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[McTraveller]

it's just one of those existential questions that's like a splinter in the back of my mind.

Choose your pill wisely!   

The basic mechanical core of awareness, I surmise, is a semantic analyzer which is fed observables about itself as part of the semantics it is analyzing in a way that semantics are attached to itself.  Maybe a crude view is a log parser that as it is parsing it generates a log, and parses that log at the same time it's parsing the other logs.  Then that log parser is connected to various outputs, and is attached to a goal-oriented machine, so the goal-oriented machine can "decide" which information in the log parser are routed to the outputs.  Oh and the parser is also parsing logs from the goal-oriented machine...

As I said - Easy!

[voliol]

Iirc, we do actually not know whether people are conscious or not when they are "unconscious". Because the same effect could be caused by being unresponsive for that time, and whatever you were conscious of not being stored in memory for you to remember after.
Compare with dreaming, when you are more or less unresponsive but conscious about and can remember whatever is in your dream, or the state you can get from a concussion (or alcohol ingestion) where you are responsive but your brain doesn't store memories for you, causing memory gaps.

[Magmacube_tr]

I suppose -as in, I think-, it is the emergent property of all electrical charge inside your brain. Maybe there is more to it. Maybe not. I have no idea.

[McTraveller]

Iirc, we do actually not know whether people are conscious or not when they are "unconscious". Because the same effect could be caused by being unresponsive for that time, and whatever you were conscious of not being stored in memory for you to remember after.
Compare with dreaming, when you are more or less unresponsive but conscious about and can remember whatever is in your dream, or the state you can get from a concussion (or alcohol ingestion) where you are responsive but your brain doesn't store memories for you, causing memory gaps.

Maybe there's a worthwhile distinction between "instantaneous consciousness" and "durable consciousness" to account for the different scenarios?

[Starver]

Easy! Consciousness is just awareness.

Mild necro because this thread popped up in my headlights, and sparked a memory of the conversation, before the other one that I was searching for to post this link in.

Of course they decide to use an image of endoskeletal Terminators (more Asimovian, insofar as 'brain' composition), during the article, although it's likely to more like lead towards Star Trek's neural packs or other 'hybrots' (as distinct from the Battle Angel Akita or Robocop style of most-/whole-body replacement cyborgs with distinct if 'suppressed' continuation of personality betwixt donor and eventual product). At least until they can gradually develop electronic analogues to the 'black box' of biological operation to gradually develop a pseudo-electronic equivalent copy of all the nuanced bioneural processing.

But perhaps the "consciousness" aspect, as admitted in the article, is just a mediocre word for what they are really trying to describe. Resonances with this thead/the quoted post aside.