I think maybe the OP was referring to Chalmers hard question about consciousness. What you are talking about is closer to the "easy" question regarding understanding the of the neurological mechanisms but that's distinct from the "what is it like" subjective mechanisms. The hard question is hard, in part, because we don't (yet, at least) have a way to measure the way subjective experience emerges, so we don't have a way to measure when it stops.

imo it still doesn't seem coherent even with the "hard question" framing, the very foundation of the hard question begs us to ask why it is that subjective experience is rather than not, lacking subjective experience means we're discussing something outside the scope of the hard question, it's akin to asking "what happened before time"?

I believe Chalmers perspective is that consciousness is fundamental and irreducible. To relate it to your example, he says

"Nobody tries to explain, say space or time in terms of something more basic than space or time. It's the same as mass or charge. They end up taking something as fundamental"[1]

In contrast, the easy problem IS trying to explain consciousness in terms of something more fundamental, like charges or energy moving across neuron synapses. The fact that it is reducible means it may be explained objectively by science, which make it the "easier" problem

[1] Conversations on Consciousness by Susan Blackmore

They suggest consciousness is fundamental and irreducible? This is like saying "where the car goes when you take all its pieces away?". Occam's razor suggests that the material (easier) explanation is much more likely to be the answer than any complex one.

It's not even a good question unless they first prove consciousness can exist outside its physical support, AKA the immortal soul.

>the immortal soul.

This is a different argument. It's not necessarily saying consciousness is distinct from matter. The panpsychist view (not sure if Chalmers is in this camp) is that consciousness is a fundamental property to all matter, from photons to the human brain. (This isn't to say a photon has experiences as a human does, but rather the complex human consciousness is derived from a much simpler forms of consciousness).

This is different from saying ""where the car goes when you take all its pieces away?". This assumes consciousness is an emergent property, rather than a fundamental one. The "car" is emergent from the right arrangement of "car parts". Rather, the question "where is the mass/charge of the car when you take away all its pieces" is a better analogy, because the car mass/charge is derived from the mass of the car part's mass/charge.

Thank you for answering. I searched more about this, and it seems like it's a controversial idea, having more traction around philosophers because there's not enough evidence to test scientifically. I too feel like conscience is an emergent property, like insects can exhibit surprisingly complex behaviors with simple minds, but it's too soon to say one way or the other without further research.

I can't say that I fully understand the concepts, but it does seem very much like it's a realm of philosophy. Annaka Harris has a pretty accessible book that introduces the idea and Philip Goff has some interviews and presentations that goes much more in-depth.

>there's not enough evidence to test scientifically.

This aligns exactly with what Chalmers says, that explaining subjective experiences is the "hard" problem precisely because we don't have a way to gather data. Gathering data is, almost by definition, an objective measure and can't give much insight into subjective experience. To a certain extent, if feels like defining or measuring subjective experience can't be looked at with traditional scientific inquiry. Unfortunately, that can also lead to a bunch of quackery.