In other words, Descartes got it backwards. The story leaves out more global processes that are far more important to the surfer. I've never called myself a neurophilosopher before, but I think the hypothesis looks approximately right, subject to some detailed niggles, begun above and continued below. These ideas are all far too shallow to account for the deep conceptual tangles involved in thinking about systems capable of bootstrapping themselves into semantic states. Just as the particular water molecules making up a breaking wave and the patterns of motion of those individual molecules keep changing throughout the enduring history of a particular wave, so too the precise neural implementation of high level control states may keep changing and may differ from one individual to another, even though there is something constant about how that control state relates to other states at a similar level, and to biological and social functions of the complete organism.
Much brain research seems to focus on what's common to human and other brains.
But there may be major differences waiting to be understood. I suspect a lot of cross species work, as well as work on differences between infants and toddlers and schoolkids and professors and people with various brain disorders and people in different cultures will be needed before we can understand what we are talking about. A full analysis of consciousness must account for a whole range of cases including the evolution of a wide variety of forms of consciousness, a host of stages through which a human mind bootstraps itself to normal consciousness, many kinds of disorders of consciousness, etc. I think we are going to need a new language for doing this.