Julian, I'm surprised you answered by referring to neuroscience. There seems to be a near-universal philosophic confusion about what science does and does not tell us.

Science per se tells us nothing explicitly about subjective experience (I know; I'm a fellow psychologist, trained in research and this may be shocking if you haven't thought of it before).

Psychological research, like all research, takes subjective experience, operationalizes it and gives us numbers. we EXTRAPOLATE from that and correlate it with subjective experience. But this is not original to me - this is the essence of David Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness."

Regarding Philip's point about the lack of agreement about consciousness, this is true of modern scientists, but is not true at all regarding the world's contemplative traditions. Philosopher Jerry Fodor says, "Not only do we have no idea how to think about consciousness, we have no idea HOW TO HAVE AN IDEA HOW TO think about it."

On the other hand, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart wrote an extraordinary book called "The Experience of God: Existence, Consciousness, Bliss."

His subtitle is the English translation of the Sanskrit term for reality - Sat Chit Ananda. And Hart shows that virtual every spiritual tradition around the world, throughout history, has been in COMPLETELy agreement about the ultimate nature of Consciousness.

Our modern science is extraordinary for giving us information about measurable patterns of our sensory experience; much less able to provide insights about our surface, ordinary experience, and basically useless when it comes to understanding the fundamental nature of things. Science is amazing, but when it's thought to be hte basis of all knowledge, it becomes not just a religion but a cult. We must be very careful to respect it for what it does, and turn to other means of knowing when it no longer has the capacity to be of use.