[nickelpro]

The hard problem has technological progress built into its definition. It defines problems of consciousness that can be solved by progress as the "soft" problems, and the problem that cannot be solved by progress as the "hard" problem. The hard problem doesn't say that a mechanism _hasn't_ been found, it says a mechanism _cannot_ be found. Like Gödel's incompleteness theorems or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle it places a limit on what can be known about the system, "[the hard problem will] persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained."

The validity of that is up to you, but if you accept the hard problem as a valid question it will not be solved by technological progress.

[chmsky00]

Yep it’s not an interesting idea, the hard problem. We can never see outside our universe. We can’t know all states of matter ever. We can’t peek beyond the speed of light. We can solve a lot of problems we actually have without an answer (42, but what…)

Humans have a willingness to see truth in metaphor and analogy, and invent them to avoid accepting we’re just meat bags.

That’s what the hard problem of consciousness is to me; biological ideation run amok.

It has useful political effects, it can be used to disabuse the self righteous because it’s a purposeful thought ending monolith, nothing more.

We’ll keep iterating on our theories of the interaction of fields and matter and stop caring about the hard problem like we quit discussing luminiferous aether. We’ll stop seeing the literal edge of reality as a boundary on experience in the first place.