I wouldn't mind defining a human brain and human cognition as nothing more than just a whole lot of interconnected neurons and that's it....
If we would be an alien species that was extremely intelligent but didn't know anything about consciousness, would we discover it while exploring the human brain? I am not sure about it, since we have not discovered anything at all that seems to point to consciousness (at least the hard problem of consciousness which also seems to be the subjective most salient aspect of it). So, I agree with francis Crick that we are nothing more than neurons, but we still need to discover what causes consciousness. Some people maintain that we should not concern ourselves with it, since it is nothing more than an emergent property of the brain. Perhaps that is right, but if that is so, we still have this explanation-gap that is not present with other emergent properties. We can understand an emergent property like "driving" of a car that is caused by all the individual components of the car working together. But that kind of understanding is not (yet) available for the brain-components causing consciousness