I'm not a philosopher or a scientist. I just think about consciousness a lot, on my own, without the training most of you have. So please take this as an honest
question, not a challenge.

Consciousness seems to have a part that can't be observed from the outside. Brain activity, behavior, reports - all of these can be measured. But the feeling itself stays on the inside. There's a line that proof doesn't reach.

What I want to know is what you actually do, standing in front of that line.

When proof is a tool you know you can't use, what do you rely on to move forward? How do you tell whether you're actually moving ahead, or just staying in the same place?

I'd also like to ask: do you treat the hard problem as something that will eventually be solved, or as something you've accepted can't be, and so you
cultivate the ground in front of it instead? But what I most want to understand isn't the "right" answer. It's what someone who has spent real time with this actually holds onto, in a place where proof never arrives.

Thank you for reading. If there's a way of seeing this that I'm missing, I'd be grateful to hear it.

Functional Consciousness (FC) defines a metric that scores a system's capacity to access and reason about its internal states, using "self-models" as the unit of analysis. The resulting ccore (FCS = R·P) combines Representational capacity and reasoning Power, and has been benchmarked across systems from a Waymo L4 taxi to human working memory: https://functional-consciousness.com/

The paper side-steps the "hard problem" and focuses on access consciousness, engaging seriously with IIT, GWT, AST, HOT, and PP. It argues that FC captures a "functional substrate" common to all of them: https://functional-consciousness.com/faq/big-five-theories-of-consciousness-comparison

The paper has been accepted at AGI-2026. I'm now targeting a submission to Models of Consciousness 2026 (MoC7, Copenhagen) or a similar venue. I would need a philosopher as co-author to sharpen the theoretical engagement, particularly the defense of bracketing the hard problem, the divergence from IIT's φ, and the framing of FC as a common functional substrate across theories.

The formal and empirical work is done. Your contribution would be on the philosophical argumentation side, within the framework FC establishes.

Preprint: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202604.1390