I see this discussion come up a lot and it always results in arguments that I think maybe come about as a result of a lack of agreed upon definitions for certain terms, so I'll start there. Here are some definitions that make sense to me surrounding the hard problem of consciousness, would love to hear if anyone else has had the same thoughts:
Subjective experience:
Essentially the range of qualia that I can say exists because I experience them. It's the information you receive from your senses that is not quantifiable. For example, a description of the color red, no matter how detailed and scientifically accurate, will ever allow a person who has never experienced sight to understand what the color red looks like.
The mind and body:
The physical apparatus through which animals like us interact with the world. From the body we receive the necessary sensory information and nourishment to exert our will on the world. With the mind we interpret all sensory information gathered from the world.
Vast neural networks read, interpret, alter and conduct data received from the body's various sensory organs. Our brains begin this process with inherited patterns of basic cognition. Certain neural pathways calcify from repeated activity, forming memories: a catalogue of previous experiences we attribute importance to. Memories, guided by our upbringing, form a scaffold with which personality forms around, totally unique to the circumstances of any individual. But at no point in this fundamentally material process do we see the necessity for qualia, subjective experience. Theoretically, would a fully accurate computer simulated brain not also experience qualia if we know for a fact that we do?
The ongoing process described above is how most people would describe consciousness. We find that messing with certain parts of the brain can interrupt consciousness, and therefore memory formation, but how can we be sure that some fundamental sensation never ends, totally divorced from the body and mind?
People who get too drunk may not remember it later, but they were certainly conscious at the time. If there exists some feeling before conception and after death, no one can know because the dead can't speak and the living don't remember it.
I think it's interesting and like thinking about it.
EDIT: To expand upon that, in all of the psychoactive substance taking I've done in all of my life, I have never managed to quite reach the point of death, thankfully. But I have pushed my brain into some very weird states that make me question whether the default state is actually privileged in some way. That no matter how far you push things, there might still be an experience there. The only times which I've lacked an experience to recount are with drugs that interrupt memory formation. In those cases I can't be quite sure to what degree my subjective experienced was distorted, or even whether it existed at all. That kind of makes it personal and interesting to me even if it's not really a scientific conversation.
Totally fair. I'm going to bow out bc this is a pet peeve for me and I definitely will not contribute to a fun conversation, but I hope folks come up with some cool discussion for you.