The fervent popular drive to explain (and explain away) consciousness is heavily misguided; I’d say pathological, but then people would get offended.
First, it’s founded in the fallacy that everything else is more or less generally explained already and consciousness is the one remaining “problem,” which is itself an illusion. The illusion can only be maintained by actively ignoring or dismissing an abundance of personal experiences people have, via the facile labeling of them as “anecdotal evidence,” and secondly, by rationalizing one’s own mystical and/or paranormal or parapsychological experiences that almost everybody has now and then, on the grounds that it “must” be due to some known cognitive bias or other mental distortion.
Second, the idea that we must or should explain everything in the world and the universe is a sick form of unrest particular to the modern zeitgeist. (This is why I put “problem” in quotes above, as in “the hard problem of consciousness.” You may think it’s just a word, but the branding of consciousness itself as a “problem” is actually extremely telling.) What the heck are we seeking so hard? Perhaps you romanticize it as bold exploration, progress, pursuit of knowledge or the satisfaction of healthy curiosity. In reality, we’re not happy until something is explained, no matter how big or small; in fact, if something happens that’s genuinely puzzling and is or seems unexplainable, it deeply bothers us until we “explain” it. And all our explanations we seek are necessarily grounded in physicalist first principles, which is a wholly dry, dead and unfulfilling basis of understanding anything (or at least living things), so whatever we’re seeking by explaining things, we’re not finding it. We ought to just be comfortable with the mystery. The point of life is not to figure it all out, it’s to have a contextual experience.
Third, the ambition to explain consciousness in any way is ultimately futile. It won’t be explained physically, though some people try to come up with clever solutions that are all ultimately trying to churn stone into magic. In some domains, explanations based on first principles other than material ones would be useful (and more satisfying to a living being), but in this domain, not even that will suffice; consciousness is ineffable magic all the way down.
A further thought: in aiming to explain consciousness (which is, really, trying to fundamentally explain ourselves, our living force), we are probably really seeking to find ourselves. There is so much more to us beyond the tip of the iceberg, we have a liminal understanding of this, and we crave full realization. We unconsciously hope to find the juicy nugget of meaning and the key to the universe somewhere down there at the bottom of all the paperwork of explaining consciousness (or perhaps we truly seek the liberation of realizing we’re still here and were never really any of that, after the ouroboros seems to successfully eat itself (as in consciousness explains itself away)), but in the end, it’s the carrot in front of the horse because we’re barking up the wrong tree.
This is what the movie Dark City was about, by the way. In some ways, fiction tells us a lot more about reality than anything else.
By the way, also think about the fact that the aliens in Dark City who were trying to figure out what makes us human (who are really just metaphorical for ourselves) were afraid of water. We fear the very thing we want most. Correspondingly, we also mortally fear anything happening that we genuinely can’t “logically” (i.e., physically and mechanically) explain and desperately seek a resolution as soon as possible.
