Consciousness

[GrandizerII]

Sure, consciousness is complicated, the same with the human brain, and the same with the human body overall. And the same with a lot of other things in this world.

But there is one aspect of what we are labeling "consciousness" that appears to have a whole other layer of complexity, and it's the one to do with phenomenal awareness.

All these other aspects, as complicated as they may be, are relatively easy to come up with [at least plausible] theoretical/scientific explanations for. Even if neuroscience were still sort of in its infancy, we have already been able to unearth various mechanisms underlying these aspects, and if we haven't yet, we can at least conceptualize potential mechanisms to account for these aspects without needing to invoke something mystical. We can "reverse engineer" these aspects, so to speak, to the underlying physical/biological processes. 

We don't currently have this same luxury when it comes to phenomenological experience, though. The mechanistic explanation for this continues to elude us, even conceptually.

My bolds.

This is an excellent explanation. I get frustrated in conversations like this because I have a hard time getting this point across.

It's like there is this realm that we know is there and we know it either interfaces with the material world or is entirely manifested by it yet seems to have properties completely outside the bounds of materialism. There is clearly a bridge between phenomenological experience and the material world but it might as well be made of pixie dust. It looks to me like there is a huge piece of the puzzle that is missing to us and until we fill in this gap in our knowledge, the solution to this problem will be outside our reach.

Actually, you have worded this better than I have. This is exactly what I'm trying to get at here.

I sometimes wonder when people can't see the hard problem, how often is it because they don't understand what the hard problem is about exactly? I can tell some out there appear to get it, but when some of them focus more on why we have consciousness rather than how, I feel like they're not understanding the concern exactly.