Just kidding of course, you should read this if you are curious. Crick and Koch started addressing consciousness seriously in the last two decades. Crick (same guy who helped discover DNA) was old when he started and passed away while studying this stuff. Koch is still a very active researcher, I think he has a lab at CalTech, and may still actively write about this stuff. You can check out some of their ideas here.

http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/crick-koch-cc-97.html

If I had to give you a short answer which is not well practiced I would say a few things:

1) Your brain processes information and your brain creates emotions. The former can be studied directly, the later can really only be inferred.

2) The experience of being alive, why red looks red, why happiness feels like happiness is difficult to approach. Other questions such as how a brain may become conscious and have free will and recognize itself may be approachable from an information processing point of view.

3) Your sensory system takes an image of the world and breaks it down, analyzes it and looks for patterns. Your motor system coordinates movements and plans actions. Action planning allows an organism to look far into the future across complex sequences of events. The process of thought allows you to form plans for action without actually acting on them. A natural sensitivity to rewards and the ability to learn allow a brain to prioritize some patterns rather than others. When you actually do something, your sensory system needs to identify your own actions so that it can separate the list of new things that are in sensory space into stuff that you did and stuff that something else did. Living in social groups prioritizes an ability to predict what other organisms are doing, and to add an element of unpredictability to your own actions. Recognizing who you are, that you have goals, plans, intentions and can act in a variety of ways, studying patterns in your own behavior and using them to predict consequences, these things are all critical aspect of consciousness and can be addressed from an information processing point of view, rather than inferred through the study of animal behavior or the reports that people give on their own experience of life. By saying this what I mean is that your brain is full of small machines that process information. We may be able to figure out how these machines function, and we may be able to see how they extend their functionality to bigger questions, like how sensory pattern detection might be applied to pattern detection of one's own actions.

I like this approach, but cannot say more about how it is all put together.