How can realist accounts of consciousness be understood? In particular when consciousness is taken to be substrate independent? Say that the components of reality have an inner as well as an outer nature and when these come together to form subsytems of sufficient informational complexity this allows the scattered prehensions to bind together into larger units capable of self-reflection, or capable of powering a pre-reflective cogito.  What then distinguishes the consciousness-like aspects of reality is precisely their ability to bind together in a mind-like way. That might be one way of thinking about it, but there seems little to distinguish it from a kind of emergentism. That consciousness so formed would have causal properties would be nothing special since it would correspond to the view of itself that emerges with it. That there should be any way of deriving or explaining the phenomenology of consciousness on the basis of its self-understanding is less clear. The response that the phenomenology as we know it is a contingent result of the role that the causal efficacy of consciousness has played in evolution seems to miss the deeper point. The way that consciousness understands itself, or can understand itself seems to be a necessary part of what it is to be conscious, and to go far beyond any sort of qualia atomism. A more Samkhya-like way of understanding it would be to propose that the essence of consciousness is unitary and independent of all instantiations, and takes the shape of consciousness as we experience it by virtue of its coming to witness, as it were, physical structures of sufficient complexity. This is a bit like the radio-receiver analogy of the brain. when an informational structure reaches sufficient integrated complexity it becomes open to a level of reality which is already conscious but outside of time and space and logic. Qualia are then like the dome of many coloured glass that allows consciousness to become visible to itself. This kind of account seems to leave the mystery untouched while at the same time leading straight into absolute idealism.