I have said for a while now that the human brain, combined with the nervous system and musculo-skelatal system, comprise the most complicated electro-mechanical system ever imagined. If you take into account the actual mechanical processes involved in the simplest motions, it becomes clear how much data the brain is actually processing to carry out that motion. Let's not even talk about language processing or music, just the mechanical control of the body is staggering. I believe that human consciousness is merely a byproduct of massive amounts of parallel signal processing from numerous data streams.