>A corollary to this idea is that consciousness is (most likely) spread throughout the brain so there is no 'one place' where things come back 'together' While

>A corollary to this idea is that consciousness is (most likely) spread throughout the brain so there is no 'one place' where things come back 'together' While it's true that consciousness-aware features are processed in a distributed manner, I don't think it follows to say that consciousness is spread throughout the brain. The core function of consciousness is integrated processing of disparate sensory data into a single decision stream. In other words, various sensory experiences can all influence our decision-making in arbitrary ways, and this "availability for high level decision-making" is what we identify as consciousness. The location of this integration-decision apparatus seems like the best place to "locate" the seat of consciousness. While cortical areas are essential for specific kinds of processing, we shouldn't "locate" consciousness "in" those areas. This is because the output of a cortical area is modulations in signals sent to various downstream target areas. If we were to artificially modulate the downstream targets with an exact duplicate of the pattern of output from the cortical area in question, we would have the same conscious experience. The conscious experience isn't in the signal or its modulation, it is in a very specific kind of integrated processing. That is, there is some kind of representational translation that takes disparate frequency modulated signals and integrates them into a communal representational schema to support the single decision stream. Presumably this communal representation should have a unique computational strategy that stands out as a change in signal dynamics as you follow a stream of sensory processing up the hierarchy. Consciousness would be localizable to within this boundary.