Thanks for the link. I'll have a look.

The challenge I took up was the hard, philosophical problem of consciousness, not the cog sci one of the mechanical details. You can argue the two problems are identical, but I think a drastic shift in philosophical perspective would still be needed to understand how that could be so.

Explaining the details won't help us see how we could be mere objects. For one thing, all social interactions would cease if we learned to think of ourselves that way, as opposed to presuming we're subjective persons, alienated from matter precisely by the apparent magic of consciousness. We'll need to understand how objective nature could turn itself into ghostly, godlike subjectivity, and that will take not just scientific theories but philosophical and perhaps religious therapy.