What is consciousness? How do people here define it?
I can't, frankly, and that's part of the problem. We don't even know what it is we're trying to explain.
Many seem to take the reductionist view that consciousness is nothing more than neurons firing, and any questions we still have will be answered in those terms.
I think that's a characature of our position. I firmly believe that consciousness involves nothing but physical processes going on in the Brain - mostly, it seems, neurons firing - but although all these processes can be reduced to that level (or further, we can go down to cell chemistry or atomic physics) the necessary explanations don't exist at that level. This isn't special pleading, it's true of almost all interesting behaviours at the macro level - I defy anyone to provide a useful description of a car engine that operates entirely at the sub-atomic level, for example, but no-one is going around claiming special stuff is needed for a car engine.
So where does the thinking come from? The personality? Likes and dislikes? Resident reductionists, please explain to me how neurons firing can possibly encapsulate everything that is involved with being conscious and self-aware.
We don't know. No-one has yet provided a useful description of how the brain causes consciousness.
We can get back to telepathy too. If it is not to be dismissed outright, then it also presents some problems for reductionism.
Prove it under properly controlled lab conditions and we'll talk.