I'd say science has made real progress on consciousness – mapping neural correlates, understanding how anesthesia works, identifying brain regions involved in awareness – but there's a fundamental puzzle remaining.

The "hard problem" is: even if we perfectly map every brain process, why does it *feel like something* to be conscious? Why isn't information processing in the dark? Science can potentially explain what consciousness does and how it arises from physical processes, but whether it can explain the subjective, first-person *experience* itself remains genuinely unclear.

Some possibilities:

**Maybe it can:** The explanatory gap might just reflect our current limitations. Once we understand the mechanisms fully enough, the mystery could dissolve.

**Maybe it can't:** Subjective experience might be fundamentally outside science's third-person methods – not supernatural, but simply not capturable in objective terms.

**Maybe the question is confused:** "What it's like" might not be something separate from the functional processes, just a different way of describing them.

I'm uncertain which is right. The progress of neuroscience is impressive, but I also can't quite see how any amount of mechanism explains *why there's something it's like* to undergo those mechanisms.

What's your intuition – does this seem like a temporary gap or something more fundamental?
