If you’re interested in current philosophical and cog-sci work being done on consciousness, you should check out the online conference on consciousness being held here:
There are lots of video presentations of papers with fairly provocative theses (for instance, David Rosenthal argues that consciousness of one’s own mental states has no function at all), and it is still possible to participate in ongoing discussions with the authors.
Warning: Rated “H” for Hard To Follow Without Previous Exposure To The Literature.
By the way, if I understand Rosenthal properly (and I haven’t read his entire paper yet – I’ll report back when I have), his view would seem to support the conclusion that one’s ability to be aware of one’s own thoughts (judgments, intentions, and desires – Rosenthal is not discussing consciousness of sense perceptions here) as such is not a product of natural selection, since, at first glance anyway, it seems that only characteristics that have turned out to benefit the organism could be selected for, and once they have been selected (by ecological pressures), procuring that benefit is their function. But that would imply that one of the few cognitive traits that sets us apart from other animals is not a product of evolution. (In regard to the thread on Intelligent Design below, please note that an argument against the evolution of a trait is not an argument for the intelligent design of that trait… Again: “either x evolved or else x was intelligently designed” is a false dichotomy).
UPDATE 3/1/09: Rosenthal does think that, because there are far fewer conscious states compared to non-conscious (“first-order”) ones, they would not be significant enough to “sustain selective pressures needed for an evolutionary explanation of consciousness.” He holds that they are rather simply by-products of other psychological factors – i.e., of linguistic abilities and certain dispositions to make causal inferences. If you’re interested, you can read the paper or watch the presentation at the site linked above.