Consciousness is the colourless, odourless, tasteless, invisible inaudible, impalpable medium in which experience happens. Your experience, or experience in general? Can you imagine an experience, or rather all the ingredients of an experience, a pre-experience, taking place but outside of such a medium and therefore not 'being' or constituting an experience? Say there was some residual reflex activity still going on in a 'dead' brain, would that be something like it? A responding to stimuli only outside of the medium which transforms such a response into experience. Say it was a chemical reaction of neurotransmitters taking place in a test tube, witnessed from the outside but not from the inside? What is wrong with this line of thinking? It has already given up the field of experience and replaced it with a theory. There is no experience in general, at least not until you've got to the bottom of your experience, this experiencing here and now. But all you can do are thought experiments, and you can imagine all sorts of variants of experience: dial up this, dial down that, let go of the immediate echo of meaning that all of your experience carries, forget yourself, your history, continuity, memory etc. and simply by virtue of having imagined them they belong to the same filiation of being as what you are experiencing now. Does this shed any light, or is it a tautology? Another idea might be that consciousness is to be in direct relation to your self. You don't know what this self is, every thought you have about it is an approximation, negated in the same moment as it is affirmed, but all these thoughts circle around something overwhelmingly real. Consciousness is not an ultimate but simply a name for being in relation to this centre, which is not itself conscious, is in no sense an experience. This line of thinking seems absurd, but it has the virtue that it seems to assign a (more) correct status to all the phenomena in the family of experience, consciousness, awareness.