The majority opinion is that consciousness exists but arises somehow from the brain. This is the "hard problem": how does subjective experience arise from the physical processes of the brain. There are two minority opinions: consciousness does not exist (it is an illusion) and consciousness is separate from the brain/body. See the cross-link to the Consciousness Project map for more details.
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I am working on the hypothesis that consciousness was stripped from our thinking on a global scale when we moved from analog to digital.