I've heard a lot of people try to localize consciousness to the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and thalamus, but does this really answer the question of consciousness? Should we really expect consciousness to be localized to particular brain structures or is it a general distributive property? How do you go about analyzing and talking about distributed properties?

The brain is a cooperative structure. In my opinion, consciousness is a wondering thing, and not localizable to one or two structures. Off the top of my head, I can think of many structures necessary for consciousness, but none that are by them sufficient for it:

Amygdala: This part of the brain is responsible for our fears. Without it, people can't feel aggression, fear, and disgust or understand these traits in others. It is also involved in our anxieties/ worries. Now I don’t know about you, but a large part of my consciousness is my avoidance of these things.

Dorsal Lateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPC): Here we have our language abilities and well as our ability to hold information "online." When you think about something, small chunks of information are in your immediate awareness. This is called Working Memory, and this region of the brain has been strongly correlated with this function.

Medial Orbital Frontal Cortex: Where the amygdala provides us awareness of the things we want to avoid, OFC tells us what we want and crave.

Cerebellum: So, the anterior cingulate, for those who don't know, is involved with monitoring errors. If you are doing something hard and you are likely to make mistakes, the ACC gets more involved. The cerebellum can be thought of as having a similar function, but rather than focusing on cognitive errors, it monitors response errors, meaning that when you intend to d something, but in fact do something else, it corrects your future responses. The cerebellum seems to also have some yet undiscovered duties and may even be involved in working g memory.

Anyway, this may be a lot more information than you wanted, but I hope I was able to make my case.

Indeed the structures mentioned take a large part in the conscious processing of information. But why is the hippocampus left out of the list? I believe that this structure might be the most important strucure providing animals with consciousness. It has already been related to short term memory and I don't see how short term memory can be very different from consciousness. The hippocampus is constantly comparing new information with old information. A filter is used before information can pass into the hippocampus ( this is done by the dentate gyrus). This is what makes certain information accessible to consciousness and other information not.

and of course, we can't leave out the role that the intralaminar nuclei (or matrix in the Jones scheme) play in consciousness.

Near-death experiences might not fully treat of the true status of brain death or life on a cellular level. But people have extra-corporeal consciousness not contingent on their senses or measurable brain activity. Can we think bigger about consciousness?

"This would amount to saying that our consciousness is not contingent on activity in our brain, which is absurd."
We cannot be absolutely certain that concsiousness is dependent on brain activity. Physical (brain) functioning requires consciousness, but we cannot postulate that
consciousness requires physical activity. Consciousness without corporeal
animation and stimulation may exhibit properties that are not perceptually
definable in this realm. This is obviously speculative, but if you look at the intensity
of this realm and the vast depth of the "energy" foundation that this intricate
existance is built on then one can definitely expect much more than what we can see!