This seems to touch on a number of contentious issues, but what i find particularly interesting is the evidence for an 'executive network' as the seat of 'conscience' (sic), a prospect that had been thrown into doubt by recent works supporting the notion that consciousness was more a product of the degree of general connectivity rather than that of any localised faculty.

Equally fascinating is the suggestion consciousness is a particularly energy-hungry process, which throws up its own raft of questions: is the process fundamentally different from other modes of network activity - perhaps akin to a higher-level language 'wrapping around' the underlying language base? Or is it just a denser, more intensive form of the same type of global processing protocols? After all, it might reasonably be anticipated that a 'master network' would be doing less work than the net throng of disparate nuclei it corrals. Is it perhaps higher frequency activity, higher voltage, or what?

@Mr.Vibrating:
You're posing a lot of pertinent questions to a discipline that's by its very nature incapable of answering. Consciousness is too elusive for science because of the requirement of reproducibility. It's impossible to measure, photograph, or record with scientific instruments. All we have is our own awareness of it and its unique profile to each and every living entity. It is massless, not even the size of a pinpoint, and is unbridled at times like the neutrino. There are some subjects that science can get information from ancient knowledge, or what was then ancient science.

I appreciate that it appears ephemeral, ethereal, intangible, subjective - or in a word, dualistic - but this is what makes the cracks in that facade so interesting.

We can switch it on or off in a variety of ways, and increasingly, measure corresponding activity of the wetware in real-time. Likewise we can influence and modify its behaviour with drugs, electrical and magnetic simulation, and exploits like subconscious priming. Then there's all manner of optical illusions, cognitive sleight-of-hand phenomenon like change blindness, somatosensory ones like phantom appendages, and a whole smorgasbord of different aphasias. Even music, that can speak to our souls, cut us down or leave us ascendant, depends on rigorous mathematical relationships - how, and in what sense, are all factors of two of a fundamental frequency perceived as equivalent? It's a rigidly mechanical valuation, wholly objective, yet innate to the depths of our psyche...

Can it be digitised, created, transplanted?

Its evidently a critical information processing function, and seems increasingly to be dependent on thermodynamic criticalities - connective thresholds, charge thresholds, temporal thresholds; an edge-of-chaos dynamical system, processing information by means of exquisitely fine-tuned efficiencies... its emergent indeterminacy bounded by strongly determined physical variables.

This is the fire. Understanding, even mastering, the chemistry, won't make the dance of the flame any less mesmerising...

@MrV-
You ought to be published with writing like that. I've had the privilege of investigating the subject with first hand experience- not with drugs, but through meditation. A few sessions resulted in the "separation" of my "consciousness" from my physical body, also known as an "out-of-body experience." When it happens, there is little doubt that it's the most profound of all experiences. I suggest you read some first-hand accounts from people in all cultures and time periods. Then pursue the experience yourself if you're so inclined.

lol for 'out of body experiences' i look no further than some of the things i was mis-sold as E in my youth, but i've dabbled in meditation too - i wouldn't describe the results as disassociative though; the whole exercise was uninterrupted sensory focus. But i was always a determinist, never a dualist, so i guess that shaped my experiences...

Cheers for the nod, however the type of 'out of body experience' i've been considering lately is mind imaging - the fruits of endeavours like the Human Connectome Project and developments in autonomous networks - the possibility of rendering mind in software...

..as for writing, with mind-software transplants as a starting point you quickly end up with a universe that makes The Matrix look tame - real and virtual worlds in parallel, both populated by organics, ex-organics & synthetics alike, inter-dependent, yet with vastly different & often conflicting restrictions and needs... recipe for a plot line from hell eh? If only i had the time..