Well I do see it pragmatically: either we're going to figure it out somewhere, and we're somewhere able to copy our conscience into a computer like Ray Kurzweil predicted - or we won't.
Knowing how conciousness actually works does not also equal the very physical ability of copying it. The latter does not necessarily get enabled by the former.
And vice versa, really - we could simulate a human brain at some point, 1:1, but we still would not know if that simulation in any way, shape or form is actually concious, or...well. Just simulates it.
There is actually an intriguing philosophical thought construct that explores this very idea in a simple example:
Philosophers David Chalmers and Daniel Dennett argue over “philosophical zombies,” created to question the nature of human consciousness.
bigthink.com
Very worth the read. The thought construct uses the concept of the 'Philosophical Zombie', which is essentially the idea of a human that.... acts human. Behaves 100% human. But actually has no conciousness at all. That's where the 'Zombie' part comes from.
The problem: It would be literally impossible to separate that human from a human that has a conciousness. They both would react the same way, act the same way. Only one would be aware of it though. Scary thought.
But that's exactly also why, even when we manage to one day create the most complex, realistic acting, amazing Artificial Intelligence in the oldschool-sense of the word...we will never know if it *actually* has any conciousness.
Now, the second issue is that so many futurists tend to compare the brain to a computer, when it comes to the whole 'We will upload ourselves into a computer!' spiel.
The whole brain = computer thing is one of the biggest self-perpetuating misunderstandings/comparisons:
Your Brain is Not a Computer
Either way - we might one day find out how conciousness works. Might. Let's say we do, sure.
But the whole futurist, Kurzweilish pseudo-scientific wet dream of copying a conciousness onto a computer is, to me, just belief, not science. It is literally just born out of sci-fi daydreams. I have no idea why everybody takes Kurzweil seriously, aside of wishful thinking, and an obsessive ignoring of human nature.
But worse, they all ignore the simple fact that *copying* is not *transfer*. I think we can agree that conciousness has very physical elements in the brain, so literally transferring that from physical matter into bits and bytes is not quite possible. So, alright, we copy whatever structural info into a simulation instead.
But. *Copying* your conciousness would leave you in the same place you were before: In your body, while a copy of your conciousness now sits inside a computer and you gained nothing. You're still going to die, and we can't even find out if there is an actual conciousness inside that simulation running in the machine. Nobody wins, they just hope they do.
In the end though, the TL;DR is:
The brain still remains, literally, the most complex object in the universe we know of. It is an amazing thing. We don't even understand many of the simplest malfunctions or behaviors, and neuroscience ever so often gets a hard reset in some parts because what seemed definitive gets tossed out the window again. Understanding conciousness is so very far off, we don't even need to consider it.