Dora Marsden wrote about this topic at length in the 1915 - 1919 run of her magazine The Egoist. Her multi-year arguments were atomized into numbered sections. A sensible quote would be too long, a short quote wouldn't make sense. I found her arguments about the origin of consciousness and language compelling enough to put her work into circulation for the first time in over a century. How many other people (much less young women) were writing about these topics, about legalized prostitution and open marriages, about comic books and automated factories... one hundred years ago?
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.