Where is the seat of your consciousness?

Where is the Seat of Consciousness?

With regard to consciousness, the question might be asked, does it stand alone; is it an intrinsic aspect of the brain's functioning? If it stands alone this is positive news for the upholders of subjectivity. For if consciousness is inherent, then is there some sort of place within the brain that we can isolate as being the seat of consciousness? Or do we have to look more for an arrangement distributed over a larger scale? These are two main questions being posed by physiologists conducting research in consciousness.

In the ‘stand alone’ argument, Daniel Dennett, (1992) Consciousness Explained, addresses the issue of whether there is a particular organ of the brain in which the sensory data coming in through the eyes to the primary visual cortex is converted further in order to make it what we see and report about, i.e. to make it ‘qualia’. 

This is really the idea that there should be some particular organ of the self in the brain. In looking at the connectivity in the visual system, Dennett dispenses with the idea of the homunculus, or a little man inside the brain which does the consciousness's work. As Dennett says, it is an empirical fact that there is not a homunculus in the brain, and even if there were we would still have to go through the same investigation of the homunculus' consciousness, and so on ad infinitum. Dennett points to the image of the Kafkaesque little man in the brain, ‘Don’t ask me, I only work here,’ bureaucratically passing the buck into infinity.

It seems pretty unlikely that there would be a particular organ of the brain which takes the incoming, by-now-integrated data flow from one’s body and the world and converts it. So as it could be put up on the screen of the mind’s eye into the qualia laden subjective world that we report. So the problem for neurophysiologists interested in consciousness is in discovering the neurophysiology of mental processes. If there is no one organ of consciousness: what could the distributed systems of the brain be that, at least, underlie consciousness. Put another way, what are the neural correlates of consciousness?