I could spend a very long time double-checking my sources, but I want to reply tonight, so please take the following with a pinch of salt, since it's largely from memory:

0. Descartes/Titchener/Chomsky and friends for background.

1. John Searle featured prominently because of his accessibility. I tended to present his Chinese Room argument as a criticism of symbolic AI alone, though I believe he considered it a criticism of sub-symbolic approaches as well.

2. Thomas Nagel's classic article "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is a good introduction to qualia, which is how we describe direct conscious experience.

3. Wittgenstein would be important in terms of the impossibility of empathising with, or seeing things from the perspective of, other minds that have emerged in different contexts (such as animals). However, I rarely spoke about him because, frankly, I couldn't understand him in the original!

4. David Chalmers. Writes clearly (and coined?) the 'hard problem' of consciousness and why subjective experience appears difficult to reconcile with a purely physical account of the mind.

4.1 Daniel Dennett. The clearest and most influential critic of the idea that consciousness presents a special explanatory problem.

5. Darwin and others. Comparative psychology (the study of animal minds) strongly suggests, by showing that the antecedents of the human mind are present in animals, that we should reduce our bias that human minds are special, ineffable, or somehow atomic.

6. Jerry Fodor. Modularity: the idea that the mind is composed of modules that specialise in certain tasks (e.g. phoneme perception, syntactic analysis, face recognition) and operate largely unconsciously unless they are dependent on one another in some way. This helps us take a computational approach to the mind. It reminds us that much of what we do mentally might be expressible in computational terms.

Two final ideas off the top of my head:

1. The Ship of Theseus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

   When (not all) neurons die off and are replaced by new ones doing the same job, our sense of self and identity is somewhat cast into doubt. In a physical system, if consciousness is a magic or non-material entity of some kind, what is happening to it during this process?

2. Integrated Information Theory. A good attempt to tackle consciousness rationally. The idea is that consciousness corresponds to, or is associated with, the degree to which information in a system is integrated into a unified whole.