I seems to me the way forward to understand consciousness scientifically is making computer simulation of parts of conscious awareness and comparing with how it works in real brains until the results are similar. "What I cannot create, I do not understand" as Feynman had on his blackboard. https://www.quora.com/What-did-Richard-Feynman-mean-when-he-...

Neural scene representation and rendering (deepmind.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313937

seems a step in that direction.