[A_D_E_P_T]

"Hard problem" makes it out to be much more difficult than it actually is. To simplify things a little bit, if you combine a spatiotemporal sense (a sense of bounded being in space and time) with a general predictive ability (the ability to freely extrapolate in time and space from one's surroundings,) "consciousness" arises necessarily. It's what having such senses feels like from the inside; the first-person view. It's a matter of degree, of course.

The writing of Chalmers and its consequences have been a catastrophe for philosophy.

[uh_uh]

> It's what having such senses feels like from the inside; the first-person view.

The hard problem is that there is such a feeling at all.

[A_D_E_P_T]

It's not hard at all when you acknowledge that such senses exist in the world, and that you (like others) possess them. As an aside it tends to foster a certain tendency towards empathy.

In essence, you're asking why there's an inside to being a self-modeling system. But "inside" isn't something extraneous, something additional -- rather, it's what "self-modeling" means.

Really the "hard problem" has a very easy answer, but it's a physical/functional answer, and dualists and obscurantists simply don't like it.