I've come to the conclusion, that science will never be able to even define consciousness, let alone explain it.
Also, as the article points out, reversing the process could potentially be useful in awakening coma patients.
Of course all that's very speculative, and more research is called for, but that's how science is done.
It appears that mice have a claustrum, and I would be very interested to see the effect of manipulating that area on their behaviour. If it has little effect, one might conclude that mice don't experience consciousness the way we do, for example, or the reverse.
Edit: here is an open access version of Crick & Koch's paper on the claustrum:
I think the real problem is that people don't really want consciousness defined. They want to keep it as this magical, special thing.
I disagree, what makes you think so? Hard problem of consciousness is the real problem. Consciousness isn't a physical thing, that's why physics can't define it.
The reason physics can't define consciousness isn't that consciousness isn't physical. Consciousness is just part of the world our current physics, and really our current philosophies, haven't developed satisfactory means to address.
Many physical phenomena, now explained by physics, were once unexplained by previous iterations of physics. Previous physics were just incomplete, until people came along with new ideas to expand what phenomena physics could explain. Doesn't mean those phenomena weren't physical things before physics evolved ways to understand them.
Says who? It is most certainly caused by physical neurons which are built by particles following the laws of physics. In principle it is both understandable and explainable in terms of physics, though likely any explanation will follow some other nomenclature (e.g. we don't describe weather in terms of motions of quarks)
The first thing should be to define consciousness IMO.
> trying to create machines that display consciousness
In other words, trying to create machines that behave like humans? I don't know what "displaying consciousness" means.
Pretty much. Consciousness is one level above science in a way, so every attempt to only use science to explain consciousness will fail. Consciousness is a metaphysical concept, "meta" = an abstraction layer above.