New indications of what drives consciousness

A theory known as "global workspace" seems to be getting some tentative empirical confirmation, including that "the researchers found a 300 ms delay between presenting the stimuli and witnessing this explosion of neural activity," which may be analogous to the famous half-second delay between starting what turns out to be a conscious action and actually consciously willing to do it.

That said, per David Chalmers, this study seems to answer an "easy question" about consciousness, or a couple, more than any "hard questions."