I always thought the question is rather trivial. It's just hard to find the correct words to talk about it: Consciousness is a language. It is just a tool to divide the world into arbitrary blocks. Except, unlike a natural language it is bijective (or maybe only injective, not sure), meaning that there is no ambiguity. There is only one possible way to describe something, which means everything has to be described fully. (and don't start talking about Lojban. It is not unambiguous the way i mean it. If a yellow car is driving down the road you can say: "there is a yellow car driving down the road", or "there is a car driving down the road". In the language of your consciousness, only one description is possible. You can experience it only in one way).

Now for example if i want to define a lighter, i know it's an object used to make fire. Now i have an idea of "object", "using", "fire", etc. An object is something that exists over a certain time at a certain place (meaning it is not constantly changing and mixing, like gas for example). Now i also have to define what "over a certain time at a certain place" means and what existing means. Now this could be something like: it has a definite borders in space and time, and no "holes", it's continuous. Sooner or later, i will reach things that are no longer dividable (like time, or "not"). Those building blocks, or words of my consciousness language are qualia.

Your consciousness is not your memories or thoughts, but the language your memories and thoughts are (written) in. If you think about like this things like self awareness are easy to understand. I already said, that everything has to be described fully, and that includes yourself. So the description of your consciousness must include the "the language" itself. (this could mean it's possible that your consciousness is fractal in nature.)

That's my understanding of consciousness based on introspection.