I don't see why consciousness would have to be in the brain at all. I don't think it is a body function in an ordinary sense. I think of it as "the reason why the camera of life is in this particular guy that is me and not anywhere else". In a way I could imagine no one is conscious, but I believe (and it's just a belief) that other people are conscious too on their own and trying to figure out the same thing. And animals and plants and even a pebble on the street have their own "point of view" to life, regardless on whether they are aware, sentient, feeling it or not, intelligent, dumb, etc.
The universe is what it is and somehow I'm special simply because I look at this universe from my own point of view. When people ask what happends after we die, or before we are born, everyone knows the question is about ourselves and what we think happends to this "camera" when our body fails. I could say, well, my uncle died, his body stopped functioning, he was buried and that's it. We all know this will happen to us too, but it's easier to see it happening on others than to ourselves, because what goes on to this "camera" is a mystery and to imagine it vanishing with us means the whole universe vanishes with it. In a way, we are never going to be buried, because when you do, there will be no "me" to watch it.
I sometimes have thought that this "camera" moves from place to place and eventually will experience everything there is from every possible point of view. That the universe just is and this consciousness is a way to slide through it in infinitesimal series of points, non simultaneously aprehended events.
