I'm simply agreeing with your evaluation (personally, I hold some hope that consciousness might be understood within our lifetimes). I was more referring to the views of some naive scientific positivists who, due to a well-intended support of neuroscience, seem entirely certain that projects like Blue Brain will yield a complete understanding of consciousness within the coming decade or so. I think many of the individuals in neuroscience who make such optimistic predictions suffer from a failure to even consider what would comprise an understanding of mind at all, and I think that this is an enormous failure indeed. Many of the more hard-nosed in the field don't want to be bothered with high-level models of nasty things like consciousness; they would rather be seen as scientists, dammit.

At the heart of Dennett's attempts to naturalize consciousness, though, is his assertion that consciousness plays a significant causal role in our behaviors. If consciousness is epiphenomenal or has no natural mechanism, how would we measure it? Any discussion of its objective nature would become fruitless, and that's the last thing that a working philosopher of science like Dennett wants. I think neuroscientists have enormous difficulty grappling with this awkward state of affairs in which philosophers sometimes have about as much to say about consciousness as they do. As such, two attitudes seem to pre-dominate neuroscience: Either consciousness ought to be left to the philosophers (read: onanists), or else a complete model of consciousness (one that at that seems oddly behavioral...) is imminent because, hey, science is the best! I resonate with your view because it is so much more moderate than the surprisingly overzealous extremes that I have encountered as a psychology student and researcher. Neuroscience is young. Sophisticated as our tools may be, we still know very little about psychology or the brain, and it's interesting to me just how much disagreement there is within neuroscience about this, as I suspect that a number of neuroscientists would even take issue with your statement that "we're actually still really quite ignorant of how the brain actually works." How dare you defile the altar of science!