Counterpoint: maybe the hard problem of consciousness is a nothing burger. Roughly speaking this is sometimes called anomalous materialism. My personal sense is

Counterpoint: maybe the hard problem of consciousness is a nothing burger. Roughly speaking this is sometimes called anomalous materialism. My personal sense is that the observable correlations between physical activity in the brain on the one hand and conscious perception on the other is sufficiently well documented that it is reasonable to assert that for every conscious perception there is a one to one physical correlation. If that is the case then, regardless of how one resolves the question of consciousness per se, studying the physical activity is studying the mechanics of consciousness. And thus to say we now nothing about it is simply wrong. As to the question of why I think understanding per se isn't related to consciousness there are a few ways to think about this: 1) the philosophical zombie _understands_ without being conscious, 2) various parts of the brain are understood to participate in understanding without being critical to consciousness (eg, I used to wake up in the morning knowing how to solve a homework problem that I didn't know how to solve when I went to sleep) and 3) artificial neural networks and other machine learning approaches can reasonably be said to understand specific things without being conscious. I think that if it isn't totally obvious, it is at least reasonable to assert that very large language models understand some things but are not conscious in any way. Recall that what I object to here is the bald assertion that we know nothing about these phenomenon. This just isn't the case operationally, philosophically, ontologically, whatever way you want to look at it.