Sometimes I feel that consciousness is a bogus concept and will be abandoned: there will never be any major progress in "understanding" it, though future philos

Sometimes I feel that consciousness is a bogus concept and will be abandoned: there will never be any major progress in "understanding" it, though future philosophers will probably discuss what 21st-century philosophers meant by "consciousness" in a similar way to how today's philosophers discuss what Hegel meant by "Aufhebung". I'd be very happy to listen to arguments against that pessimistic viewpoint because then the hundreds of hours I've spent reading and thinking about the topic won't have been wasted. The last book I read on the subject was Hofstadter's "I am a strange loop". I found myself agreeing with almost everything he wrote, so the book wasn't very exciting for me, though I should look up some of the bits of music he mentioned.