>If it were trivial, we'd be creating conscious entities via knowhow and will, not the old fashioned (fun) way.
I wasn't claiming the problem of consciousness as a whole was trivial, rather the specific questions being asked in the above comment become trivial when a biological origin of consciousness is assumed.
> But we have no useful way of understanding the phenomena we feel and how that might differ from the robot, or a cat, or a bat, or whatever.
This isn't entirely true. We've studied the brain and the relationship between the brain and consciousness for decades. We may not understand exactly how consciousness arises in the brain, or even why it exists, but there is absolutely a pile of evidence that consciousness is something the brain creates and that it doesn't exist apart from the brain.
>Software can be transferred to other hardware, and there are many questions to be had whether software is consciousness, and also what the nature of that consciousness is given that there's clearly a layer of representation (1s and 0s) different than the material reality of the electrons pumping through silicon.
If you want to be pedantic, software isn't ever transferred, only copied.
Also, while the "brain as computer" metaphor is tempting, I think it's also misleading. Decades of failure to produce a general AI demonstrate how alien one architecture is from another. Brains just don't operate enough like computers for comparisons of biological consciousness to software to be meaningful.
And that 'layer of representation' is an illusion. There are no 1s and 0s separate from the material reality of electrons and silicon, that's an entirely human abstraction that doesn't exist in the hardware, certainly not at the physical level where quantum effects become relevant and everything is just a charge that does or doesn't meet a tolerance.