Consciousness was one reason I got interested in neuroscience 20 years ago. After graduating with a PhD in neuroscience in 2011 I felt I knew just a little more. Over the last couple of years I read extensively about different psychotherapy approaches and pretty much ignored the science about consciousness. Out of the psychotherapy approaches the most interesting ones were internal family systems and psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. Over the last 6 months I came across the research by Michael Levin in bioelectricity. After listening to tens of hours of presentations and podcast episodes with Michael Levin I realized that he actually has some interesting ideas about consciousness. He thinks that cognition (and maybe consciousness) is a property of the cells in general and that neurons are not special. I agree with the assessment that cognition is likely universal. The implications are pretty profound. It is very likely that our organs have some level of cognition. Also it seems that in the brain there are multiple conscious agents that interact with each other. Only one or some of these conscious agents have access to the language module. The other agents manifest in other ways: maybe movement, emotions, writing…. The psychological approaches mentioned earlier (e.g internal family systems and psychedelic assisted psychotherapy) facilitate a discussion between these conscious agents. Meditation is another way to get access to these agents. Currently in psychology there is a separation between consciousness (the conscious agent(s) with access to language) and the subconscious level (the conscious agents without access to language). I feel that this separation is misleading. In my opinion all these agents are conscious.
Nature is full of examples where even simple cells are capable of making amazing decisions. This is an interesting experiment: youtube link
I will spend the next year thinking and reading on this topic. I have a book list already.