I think you're missing the point. A brain could encode "pleasure", and respond appropriately to that and other complex stimuli without there being anyone actually feeling that pleasure. But there is, and that's unexplained. That's not just a defect in our understanding of brains, it's something which we don't understand on the level of physics.

Yep. People talk about the hard problem, but it’s lots of things.

The consciousness process might have obvious components, and many non-obvious ones, but until those factors explain why it seems like a first-person experience…

Well dang, a “first-person experience” remains basically undefined! So we’re not even to that bridge yet!

My guess is that both questions will be answered at about the same time. I highly doubt that we’ll just get scientifically used to “well we get how brains work, so that’s the self.”

At least as long as anyone resembling us keeps wondering, we’ll keep looking.

> A brain could encode "pleasure", and respond appropriately to that and other complex stimuli without there being anyone actually feeling that pleasure.

It could, but would that be a more efficient way to interact with the world? We see more complex brains coinciding with a greater ability to create abstractions about the world and leading to a greater flexibility when it comes to problem solving. Hard coding things occurs in simpler life forms with very limited to no ability to solve problems.

People often say "well, nature could create a p-zombie" - could it? It's far from clear that someone could hard code the types of interactions we engage in. Look at the early AI efforts and the failure to simply hard code rules there. Natural selection tends to push creatures in the direction of doing things efficiently, and it seems that our brains are no different. Despite it "feeling wrong" to some people.

> Hard coding things occurs in simpler life forms with very limited to no ability to solve problems.

Hard coding also occurs frequently in humans. There are countless things that are universal (or almost universal) human experiences. Smiling, laughing, pain, walking, kissing. Even things like language seem to be based universal constants (although the specifics vary).

> We see more complex brains coinciding with a greater ability to create abstractions about the world and leading to a greater flexibility when it comes to problem solving

Yes, but the question is whether that ability to create flexible abstraction relates in any way to the ability to have conscious experience. And if so, then how. We can see from deep learning AI models that it's possible to create flexible abstractions artificially. They don't match humans at the moment, but we've yet to hit the limits.

> It could, but would that be a more efficient way to interact with the world

More efficient than what. The point is that we really have no clue what phenomenal experience is.

I thought I covered that. Subjective perception is a mental process. There’s nothing there besides an intricate bunch of signals and processing. The signal that says “you Exist” is just hardwired to look Extremely Important to us, so we put it on different category than “you need to pee”, for example. It’s up there with “Intense pain”, and we feel it all the time while we are awake. What I am saying is that we are all “zombies”. Or put it in another way, qualia is completely “simulable” thing.

The "hard problem" is how it is possible for anything to "look like" or "feel like" anything in the first place. Not only do we not know how to simulate that, we don't even know how to sense that it is taking place in anything other than our own minds.

But that’s the same kind of situation as figuring out how windows draws the solitaire on the screen.

Imagine that you lack all context about computers. You are intelligent, but grew up on a desert island. Then a boat arrives. You see a sailor taking pictures with their iPhone. You don’t even know what you are looking at. “What is a computer and how does a computer work” would take years to explain. The same goes with “how does a screen work”. Etc.

At the stage we are, asking “what is conscience” is like that hunter gatherer asking “how does the little box show my friend’s image inside”. The answer is going to be “let me give you some context first, you are missing too many pieces”.

We just need more pieces. But that doesn’t mean that it is hard. When you are missing lots of pieces, knowledge grows slowly, usually.