It turns out that Roger Penrose studied this in depth, in The Emperor's New Mind. Penrose is the fellow who teamed up with Stephen Hawking to prove that time and space had a beginning, for which they won the Nobel Prize for Physics c. 1982. In New Mind, Penrose examined whether any explanation is possible for consciousness itself (another way to look at it is, can one prove a beginning for consciousness as they did for space and time?).
Penrose concluded that consciousness is inexplicable.
I was very unsatisfied with Penrose's finish in that book. His conclusion left too many questions and seemed rather arbitrary. I prefer Hofstadter's "Godel Escher Bach" coupled with "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies".
But the book that best handles this subject (embodied mind) is "Philosophy In The Flesh". I forget the authors right now but I'll post them when I get home. It presents how the findings of analytical psychology and neuroscience has changed our view of the mind, away from classical western philosophy and a platonic world view.
Not to summarize the book here but it shows how our thoughts are mostly metaphorical. The metaphors arrive from our bodies interaction with the physical world. I'm feeling up today. We have a long way to go. Stocks are down. How these relations arrive can then be traced to how our nerves develop.