I don’t agree with Scott Aaronson (and David Chalmers) that “the hard problem of course is to explain how … a bunch of neural firings could possibly give rise to first-person subjective experience” (1:43).
Firstly, there is no evidence that neural firings do, in fact, ex nihilo, GIVE RISE TO first-person subjective experience because as he says: “it's not as if we have some consciousness meter that, you know, we could just take out into the field” (5:54).
And secondly, there is no reason to think that “first-person subjective experience” is actually a problem at all, because first-person subjective experience might just be an inherent characteristic of consciousness, as opposed to consciousness having a zombified characteristic, just like other aspects of the world, like laws of nature, have their own inherent mathematical characteristics that we don’t seem to question.
Scott Aaronson has defined “the pretty hard problem to be … just to give some general criterion for taking an arbitrary physical system, you know a description of any physical system, and deciding whether it is conscious or not” (4:06). But of course, if consciousness was built from a panpsychist type of fundamental-level consciousness-component, just like matter is built from a fundamental-level matter-component, then his “pretty hard problem” morphs into the issue of how higher-level consciousness could be built out of this lower-level consciousness.
Though, as he explains, IIT which attempts to “measure the amount of information integration in an arbitrary physical system” (9:44), and “any theory of the form [where] sufficient complicatedness or interconnectedness or whatever implies consciousness is just doomed to failure” (19:27).
But I think the main issue is: What use is consciousness, and why does consciousness persist if it has no utility?
My answer to this issue is that a differentiated system, differentiated at a fundamental level into categories (like mass and position), relationships between these categories (i.e. laws of nature), and numbers that apply to the categories, needs to be able to differentiate/ discern difference in its own on-the-spot categories and numbers. Basic consciousness IS on-the-spot differentiation, not via a written table of categories and their associated numbers, but differentiation via every category and associated number being experienced differently. Higher-level consciousness is then built out of this basic aspect of consciousness.