Either there is a phase transition of consciousness or there is not. If there is, we have no idea where it is because we can't prove that another being has subjective experience the way we can ourselves. If there isn't, then something roughly panexperientialist follows and even, say, a gas cloud has (very occasionally and very limited) experience. But which is it?
The problem to science itself seems to be that we can't make any comparison of the "what it is like to be" sense of experience. I experience things right now. I can't tell you what it's like with the kind of certainty that is usually associated with science. I can't even tell my future self with that certainty, because memory is a sense in itself and when I recall something, I'm just experiencing something with the sense of memory.
If whatever experience is can't be "frozen", then science has nothing to work on, apart from trying to get at it from the objective side of things. But it seems like it's very easy to get sidetracked, hence the argument that Dennett just redefines consciousness as executive function and then proceeds to explain the latter in a materialist framework.