You know, I think we're getting lost in the little details here, and we keep communicating past one another.

Sorry, you're right, I tend to do that a lot :-(

I now suspect what you originally meant was that you don't think there is a hard problem, so there wasn't anything to answer.

That's correct, I think; though obviously I'm all for acquiring a better understanding of consciousness.

Eventually it almost certainly comes down to brain behavior. Even if it's not clear what that pathway could be...

I think it's not entirely clear what that pathway is, but there are some very good clues regarding what that pathway could be, since certain aspects of consciousness (such as vision, f.ex.) are reasonably well understood.

This, to me, really sounds like you're saying we can't detect qualia, so we might as well assume there are no qualia, so we shouldn't worry about how qualia arise.

Pretty much, but I think we should make a distinction between a person's own qualia, as experienced by the person, and the qualia of other people, from the point of view of that same person. Let's call the person's own qualia "P" and everyone else's qualia (from the point of view of the person) "Q".

Obviously, each person individually can detect P. Until some sort of telepathy gets developed (assuming that such a thing is possible in principle), no person can detect Q (at least, not directly).

You seem to be saying -- and I could be wrong about this, so I apologize in advance if that's the case -- that, in order to build a general theory of consciousness, we need to figure out a way to study P in an objective way. This is hard (I would say, impossible), since P is by its nature subjective, and thus inaccessible to anyone other than yourself.

I, on the other hand, am arguing that a general theory of consciousness can be built based solely on the same kind of evidence that compels us to believe that other people experience things -- i.e., that Q exists and is reducible to brain states. Let's say that we built some sort of a statistical model of consciousness. We can estimate (with a reasonably high degree of certainty) what any given person will experience in any situation, by using this model and plugging in a whole bunch of parameters (representing the person and the situation). I think you would you agree that such a model can, in principle, exist (though please correct me if I'm wrong). Then, would you agree that this model can also predict what you, yourself, will experience in a given situation ? If not, then why not ? If yes, then how is P any different from Q ?

So all I'm left with is an insistence that if my understanding of the universe is completely off and it turns out to be possible to remove conscious experience from people, I most certainly would not want that done to me...

I agree, but I believe that removing a person's consciousness will necessarily alter his behavior; in most cases, this alteration would be quite drastic. Thus, I definitely wouldn't want this done to me, or to anyone else, for this matter.

However, I think you are contemplating a situation where we remove a person's consciousness, and yet his behavior (which includes talking about his consciousness) remains exactly the same. I argue that, if such a thing is possible, then consciousness is a null concept, since it has literally no effect on anything we could ever detect. As far as I understand, you agree with me with respect to Q, but disagree with respect to P. But then, you must necessarily believe that P is categorically different from Q, somehow... mustn't you ?

If you do believe this, then you must also believe that any model of consciousness that we could possibly build will work correctly for anyone other than yourself. This seems highly unlikely to me, however -- what makes you such an outlier ? You are a human like the rest of us, after all. And if you are not an outlier, and yet you believe that the model won't function for you, then you must believe that such a model cannot be built in principle (i.e., it won't function for anyone else, either), and yet I think you would deny this. As I see it, the only way to reconcile these contradictions is to reject the idea that P is categorically different from Q, and thus there's nothing special about your own qualia, and thus the problem consciousness isn't any harder than the problem of, say, unifying gravity with the other fundamental forces (which is pretty hard, admittedly).