[vekker]

Commenting a bit late since I had this tab open for a while, but I find this discussion interesting. Even more magical than consciousness itself, are people denying that there even is a hard problem of consciousness to begin with (if you assume the standard model) ;) You started with asking if consciousness is really that magical and finished with basically admitting that we don't have an answer for how it works yet.

The hard problem of consciousness is not just about the why, it's also about the how. That's exactly the magical part: how subjective, non-physical experiences (supposedly) come from physical interactions. Brushing it off as "evolution" is not sufficient to explain the how.

[keymone]

You’re right, I have no idea how and that’s hard to figure out. Probably I misunderstood the statement of the problem by only focusing on the why part.

Coming from engineering background, I would say we need to be looking for self perpatuating loops of neuronal activity (“strange loops” may be quite appropriate concept), but how would we go about looking for them - I have no idea because I’m not up to date on modern brain scanning tech.