Reddit mentions of The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain (Bradford Books)

“Brian McLaughlin wrote the entry on consciousness for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Consciousness. He said the Churchlands don’t believe in consciousness. And it was so interesting because we had studiously avoided saying any such thing about consciousness. So I phoned Brian after I read this and I said, ‘Well, what the fuck?’”
-Patricia Churchland

This. I did my MA work under the Churchlands and it never ceases to amaze me how many philosophers attribute to them a disbelief in consciousness. After attending their lectures, having informal conversations, and reading significant portions of their published work, I never found a single instance of them denying the existence of consciousness.

I found several where they affirmed it as a legitimate unexplained puzzle in neuroscience and one that they hoped to contribute to solving. Paul has argued in detail that consciousness may be implemented by a recurrent neural network which uses the reticular activating system, which has its hub in the thalamus and feedback connections to all parts of the cortex, and this looks to me like a more substantive suggestion than anything the folks who chide them for "not taking consciousness seriously" have offered.

And yet, nearly every time their names come up in a conversation, somebody is talking about them as the crazy people who deny consciousness. Maybe this encyclopedia entry is part of the reason.

https://www.federaljack.com/ebooks/Consciousness%20Books%20Collection/Paul%20Churchland%20-%20Engine%20of%20Reason%20-%20Seat%20of%20Soul.pdf

Anyway, it's available on google by searching for "engine of reason"+"seat of the soul"+pdf.
I'm not praising piracy, by the way, a girl stole my hard copy many years ago and I remember that it was available for free on MIT resources.

Nonetheless, it's cheap enough and I really suggest the hard-copy.It's worth every penny!
https://www.amazon.com/Engine-Reason-Seat-Soul-Philosophical/dp/B005DIAZCW

There are lots of variants of the identity theory, but let try to articulate one version. It's the sort of account that Paul Churchland gives in The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul (which I strongly reccomend!).

Here's an optical illusion. If you look at the inverted flag for 30 seconds, when the screen then goes blank, you'll see the red stripes of the American flag. Of course, there aren’t really any red stripes that you see. What I mean when I say "you'll see red stripes" is that you'll have a certain experience that you might characterize by using those words. There is a certain phenomenal character, a certain "what-it's-likeness", to that experience. That character is what we might call "experiencing redly." The identity theorist says that experiencing redly is identical to undergoing a certain neurophysiological process.

To explain why one might think this, you have to think about what's going on in your brain when you look at that optical illusion. When you look at the green stripes of the pre-image, the green and blue cones in your eyes are doing a lot of work. When the image turns off, these cones are fatigued, and so the red cones are more active relative to these ones. The relative activation of these cones sends a signal to your visual cortex where these activation levels are represented in a vector-space in your brain. There are vector spaces corresponding to each of your sensory modalities. The one corresponding to color vision we might call "color space."

Now, your brain also has self-monitoring capacities by which it is able to represent its own activity and integrate it into a higher-order representation. The higher-order representation of the activity in a certain region in the color space is what we called "experiencing redly." On such an account, both the first-order and the second-order representation are cashed out in purely neurophysiological terms. Accordingly, qualia are complex neurophysiological processes.

Of course, there remain many questions to be asked about such an account, but I don't see any obviously insurmountable philosophical problems with an account that thinks about qualia along these lines.

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Edit: Just a note to the person who responded (the comment seems to have been deleted):

Lots of philosophers of mind are internalists about phenomenal qualities like color. So they'd reject the claim that colors exist in the world. Adam Pautz, for instance, defends phenomenal internalism on empirical grounds. One of the main arguments he gives is what he calls "the argument from structure." The basic idea is this:

Colors bear certain structural relationships to each other, and that’s essential to their being the colors that they are. It’s essential to something’s being violet for instance, that it is closer to red than it is to green. Thinking of colors in terms of the brain's vector-representation of quality spaces preserves this structure. However, if you think of colors as physical properties of things in the world (such as the reflectance properties of objects), this structure is not preserved. Consider that the wavelengths of light corresponding to violet are around 400nm, and those corresponding to the color green are around 550nm, whereas those corresponding to red are around 700nm. Accordingly, if we wish to identify colors with some physical property, there is more reason to identify them with internal states than external ones.