Mitchell, Unknown, I worry you may have misunderstood the point.

The question "Why am I conscious?" is not meant to be isomorphic to the question "Why do I think I'm conscious?" It's just that the latter question is guaranteed to be answerable, whether or not the first question contains an inherent confusion; and that the second question, if fully answered, is guaranteed to contain whatever information you were hoping to get out of the first question.

"Explain" is a recursive option - whenever you find an answer, you can hit "Explain" again, unless you hit "Worship" or "Ignore" instead. If the answer to "Why do I think I'm conscious?" is "Because I'm conscious"; and you can show that this is true evidence (that is, you would not think you were conscious if you were not conscious); and you carry out this demonstration without reference to any mysterious concepts (i.e., "Because I directly experience qualia!" contains four mysterious concepts, not counting "Because"); then you could hit the "Explain" button again regarding "Because I'm conscious."

The point is that by starting with a belief, you start with an unconfused thing - the belief may be about something confused, but the belief itself is just a cognitive object sitting there in your mind. Even if its meaning is self-contradictory, the representation is just a representation. "This sentence is false" is paradoxical when you try to interpret it, but there is nothing paradoxical about writing four English words between quote marks, it happens all the time.

If you're asking "Why is the sentence 'This sentence is false' both true and false?" you'll end up confused, because you dereferenced it in the question, and the referent is self-contradictory. Ask "Why do I think the sentence 'This sentence is false' is both true and false?" and you'll be able to see how your mind, as an interpreter, goes into an infinite loop - suggesting that not every syntactical English sentence refers to a proposition.

By starting with a belief, un-derefenced, inside quote marks, you start with an unconfused thing - a cognitive representation. Then you keep tracing back the chain of causality until you arrive at something confusing. Then you unconfuse it. Then you keep tracing.

It really does help to start with something unconfused.

Unknown said: So there is an actually unanswerable question (at least as far as anyone knows, by any concepts anyone has yet conceived of), and it is not a meaningless question.

1) No one knows what science doesn't know.

2) Perhaps you should ask "Why do I think this question is unanswerable?" rather than "Why is this question unanswerable?"

If Eliezer has his way, consciousness is not a "hard problem" at all, since asking why people are conscious is the same as asking "why do people think they are conscious," while "thinking one is conscious" is identified with a physical state of one's brain.

The reason Eliezer cannot have his way is that the identity or non-identity of physical and mental reality is irrelevant to explanation. For example, presumably light of different colors is identical to light of different wavelengths. But if I ask, "why does that light look red," it is NOT a sufficient explanation to say that the light has a certain wavelength, NOR to say that my brain reacts to this wavelength in such and such a physical way. It is easy to see that the explanation is insufficient because given the explanation (info about wavelengths and brain states), one would not be able to draw the conclusion that the light would look red, unless one is given the info that a certain brain state is equivalent to seeing red. But this is the point: why is this brain state equivalent to seeing red? The question, "Why do I think that this brain statement is equivalent to seeing red," is now not helpful at all, because presumably the reason I think they are identical is because they are identical. But why are they identical? This is just what has not been explained, and cannot be explained. So there is an actually unanswerable question (at least as far as anyone knows, by any concepts anyone has yet conceived of), and it is not a meaningless question.

"Why do I think I was born as myself rather than someone else?"

Because a=a?

"Why do I think reality exists?"

We could well be in a matrix world, with all an illusion. Or, perhaps we arrived just a moment ago, but intact with false implanted memories. (Sort of like the creationist explanation of evidence for evolution.)

The assumption that "reality exists" is mere convenience. It's helpful in order to predict my future observations (or so my current memory suggests to me). Even if this is a matrix world, there is still the EXACT SAME theory of "reality", which would then be used to predict the future illusions that I'll notice.