I love this question. As it happens, I wrote my honors thesis on the mind-body problem (while I was a philosophy and math double-major at UC Berkeley), and have been passionately interested in consciousness, brains (and also AI) ever since (a couple decades.)

I will try to be self-disciplined and remain as agnostic as I can – by not steering you only toward the people I think are more right (or “less wrong”.) Also, I will resist the tendency to write 10 thousand word answers to questions like this (which in any case would still barely scratch the surface of the body of material and spectrum of theory and informed opinion.)

I have skimmed the answers already given, and I think the ones I have read on this page are very good, and also, as intellectually honest and agnostic, as one would expect of the high caliber folks on this site.

Perhaps I should just give a somewhat meta-data answer to your question, and maybe I will add something specific later on, after I have a chance to look up some links and bookmarks I have in mind (which are distributed among several laptops, cloud drives, desktop machines, my smartphone and my Ipad, plus the stacks of research paper hardcopies I have all over my living space.)

The “meta-data”, or, strategic and supportive advice, would include the following.

1) Congratulations on your interest in the most fascinating, central, interdisciplinary, intellectually rich and fertile, and copiously addressed scientific, philosophical, and human nature question, of all. 2) Be aware that you are jumping into a very, very big intellectual ocean. You could fill a decent sized library with books and journals, or a terabyte hard drive with electronic copies of the same sources, and it is now more popular then ever in more disciplines than formerly would take up the question. (For example of the latter, hard-core neurologists – clinical and research – and bench-level working lab neurobiologists, are publishing routinely some amazing papers seeking to pin down, or theorize, or otherwise shed light on “the issue of consciousness.” 3) Give yourself a year (or 10) -- but it will be an enjoyable year (or 10) -- to read widely, think hard, and keep looking around at new theories, authors, papers. I think it is fair to say that no one has “the answer” yet, but there are excellent and amazingly imaginative proposed answers, and some of them are likely to be significantly close to being at least on the right track. After a year or more, you will begin to develop a sense of the kinds of answer that have more or less merit, as your intuitions will sharpen, and you build up new layers of understanding. 4) Be intellectually "mobile." Look everywhere… Amazon, the journals, PubMed, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (just Google them, they have great summaries) and various cognitive science sub collections.

The good news is nearly everything you need to conduct any level of research, is online for free -- in case you don’t have a fortune to spend on books.

Lastly, as it happens, something for down the road a couple months, I am in the process of setting up a couple of YouTube channels, which will have mini-courses of lectures on certain special application areas, like AI, as well as general introductions to the mind-body problem, and its different guises. It will take me a couple months to go live with the videos, but they should be helpful as well. I intend to have something for all levels of expertise. But that is in the future. (Not a commercial announcement at all... it will be a free and open presentation of ideas -- a vlog, but done a bit more rigorously.)

It is my view that most introductory and some sophisticated aspects of the “mind-body problem” -- at least: why there is one and what forms it takes and which different, unavoidable lines of thought land us there -- can be explained by a good tutor, to any intelligent layperson. (I think there is room to improve on the job of posing the problem and explaining its ins and outs, over ways it is done by many philosophy and cognitive science instructors, which is why I will be creating the video sequences.)

But, in general, you are in for quite an adventure. Keep reading, keep Googling. The resources available are almost boundless, and growing rapidly.

We are in the best time so far, in all of human history, for someone to be interested in this question. And it touches on almost every branch of human knowledge or thought, in some way… from ethics, to interpretations of quantum mechanics.

Maybe you, or one of us in here, will be the “clerk working in a patent office” that connects the right combination of puzzle pieces, and adds a crucial insight, that dramatically advances our understanding of consciousness, in a definitive way.

Enjoy the voyage…

Blindsight is an excellent hard sci-fi novel which you might want to consider reading if you like that sort of thing, and I'll say no more about it.

If you liked Blindsight's ideas, you should definitely try to read Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity by Thomas Metzinger. Apparently Blindsight was heavily inspired by it. This is what the author has to say about it:

Let's get the biggies out of the way first. Metzinger's Being No One is the toughest book I've ever read (and there are still significant chunks of it I haven't), but it also contains some of the most mindblowing ideas I've encountered in fact or fiction. Most authors are shameless bait-and-switchers when it comes to the nature of consciousness. Pinker calls his book How the Mind Works, then admits on page one that "We don't understand how the mind works". Koch (the guy who coined the term "zombie agents") writes The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, in which he sheepishly sidesteps the whole issue of why neural activity should result in any kind of subjective awareness whatsoever.

Towering above such pussies, Metzinger takes the bull by the balls. {Spoilers for Blindsight, use rot13}: Uvf "Jbeyq-mreb" ulcbgurfvf abg bayl rkcynvaf gur fhowrpgvir frafr bs frys, ohg nyfb jul fhpu na vyyhfbel svefg-crefba aneengbe jbhyq or na rzretrag cebcregl bs pregnva pbtavgvir flfgrzf va gur svefg cynpr. I have no idea whether he's right— the man's way beyond me— but at least he addressed the real question that keeps us staring at the ceiling at three a.m., long after the last roach is spent. Many of the syndromes and maladies dropped into Blindsight I first encountered in Metzinger's book. Any uncited claims or statements in this subsection probably hail from that source.

Well, Chalmers is outright dualistic, so that's not the update I was talking about. What I think you will find unexpected is that someone who identifies as a dualist can still have a deeply intelligent take on consciousness that is both scientifically-minded and fully cognizant of the standard physicalist arguments.

Definitely Godel, Escher, Bach if you haven't already.

Consciousness is pretty damn weird and no one seems to have much of a handle on it

That sums up the current state of knowledge. What does it mean to be an "observer"?

I assume by "consciousness" you mean the hard problem of consciousness, i.e. why do I have subjective awareness at all. The "easy" problem, how other people's brains cause them to do stuff, is fairly well-covered by standard neuroscience texts.

If you genuinely find this hard to imagine, I recommend that you read the book. I suspect you are in for a big update if you do. Despite being ultimately wrong (in my opinion), Chalmers' treatment of consciousness is the most sophisticated and careful that I have seen.

He is aware of all the obvious (and many of the non-obvious) criticisms of the whole zombie thing, and addresses them in the book.

Even if you end up disagreeing with his conclusions (as you probably will), I'm fairly sure the book will significantly reconfigure how you think about the problem.

It is if we define a utility function with a strict failure mode for TotalSuffering > 0.

Yeah, but... we don't.

(Below I'm going to address that case specifically. However, more generally, defining utility functions which assign zero utility to a broad class of possible worlds is a problem, because then you're indifferent between all of them. Does running around stabbing children seem like a morally neutral act to you, in light of the fact that doing it or not doing it will not have an effect on total utility (because total suffering will remain positive)? If no, that's not the utility function you want to talk about.)

Anyway, as far as I can tell, you've either discovered or reinvented negative utilitarianism. Pretty much no one around here accepts negative utilitarianism, mostly on the grounds of it disagreeing very strongly with moral intuition. (For example, most people would not regard it as a moral act to instantly obliterate Earth and everyone on it.) For me, at least, my objection is that I prefer to live with some suffering than not to live at all - and this would be true even if I was perfectly selfish and didn't care what effects my death would have on anyone else. So before we can talk usefully about this, I have to ask: leaving aside concerns about the effects of your death on others, would you prefer to die than to live with any amount of suffering?

So, you say you have a "preference not to suffer" for everyone, but "preference not to die" only for a few people, if I read it correctly.

When you are asking how someone can have a "preference not to die" for everyone, I think you should also ask how you have a "preference not to suffer" for everyone, because to me it seems rather similar. I mean, the part of "preference not to ... for everyone" is the same, so we can ask whether this is realistic, or is just some kind of illusion, to create a better self-image. The difference between wanting someone not to suffer and not to die does not seem so big to me, knowing that many people prefer not to die, and that the idea that they will die causes them suffering.

Another thing is the technical limitation of the human brain. If a death or a suffering of one person causes you some amount of sadness (whether we measure it by neurons firing, or by hormones in blood), of course a death or suffering of million people cannot cause you million times more neuron signals or hormones, because such thing would kill you instantly. The human brain does not have the capacity to multiply this.

But for a transhumanist this is simply a bug in the human brain. What our brains do is not what we want them to do. It is not "what my brain does, is by definition what I think is correct". We are here to learn about biases and try to fix them. The human brain's inability to properly multiply emotions is simply yet another such bias. The fact that my brain is unable to care about some things (on the emotional level) does not mean that I don't. It merely means that currently I don't have the capacity to feel it on the gut level.

All else being equal, if you have the choice, would you pick (a) your son/daughter immediately ceases to exist, or (b) your son/daughter experiences a very long, joyous life, filled with love and challenge and learning, and yes, some dust specks and suffering, but overall something they would describe as "an awesome time"? (The fact that you might be upset if they ceased to exist is not the point here, so let it be specified that (a) is actually everyone disappearing, which includes your child as a special case, and likewise (b) for everyone, again including your child as a special case.)

People, by and large, appear to favor suffering over suicide. I don't think it can be ethical to overrule that choice.