yup, exactly one thing is going on in our brains - a vast sea of elementary particles and fundamental fields interacting. It's very inconvenient to talk about things this way, so we can refer to the gross effect of these interactions in the brain as thoughts, neurons firing, conciousness, chemical reactions, etc, as it becomes covenient to do so.
This does not accurately describe what most people mean when they talk about consciousness. It may turn out that conscious experience can be reduced to certain neuronal interactions, but such a reduction (even establishing the existence of such a reduction) would count as a major empirical advance. If all our talk about consciousness was in fact merely a matter of convenience, then the existence of the reduction wouldn't be an empirical question. It would be true by definition. Analogy: we now understand that heat is simply molecular motion, but that doesn...
In Zombies! Zombies? Eliezer mentions that one aspect of consciousness is that it can causally affect the real world, e.g. cause you to say "I feel conscious right now", or result in me typing out these words.
Even if a generally accepted mechanism of consciousness has not been found yet are there any tentative explanations for this "can change world" property? Googling around I was unable to find anything (although Zombies are certainly popular).
I had an idea of how this might work, but just wanted to see if it was worth the effort of writing.