Anyway, it seems like a lot of people are talking about that inner sense of me-ness, or selfhood, or maybe for Freud, the Ego; the thing that I refer to when I say "me". That has nothing to do with the hard problem of consciousness, since it's trivial to show that that phenomenon is not a permanent feature of experience: go watch a good movie, read a book or do anything else that occupies your mind. In those experiences, it's pretty obvious that the sense of me-ness isn't present, in moments of intense focus, etc. But other phenomena are present, so then it's obvious that the sense of self is an object of consciousness that comes and goes, not consciousness itself.

In our most simple understandable form, we are energy. Consciousness could be a form of energy "resonance." Similar to standing waves, intelligence may structure energy into an orderly form that we call consciousness.

Will neuroscience beakthroughs help us understand how and if consciousness emerges from resonance in the brain? Probably.

A big question is, "Why am I experiencing this one particular life out of 6.5 billions possible lives?" Well, maybe the answer is all too obvious: You're only "you" because of isolated sensory input and isolated memory. Memories may one day be digitally recorded and swapped between people, ending people's doubts of "Am I the only one with perception?" and "Is my consciousness somehow unique?" To the dismay of many, we may find the answers to both to be, "No."

Based on these 3 findings I suggest that we are:
1) driven unconsciously to interpret events in terms of roughly similar previous events (metaphors or pattern matching)
2) Driven to explain our unconscious feelings and thoughts by conscious narrative that we assemble post hoc (if you ask people (or yourself!) why they have done things they often struggle to produce anything other than a shallow explanation)
3) Because our consciousness (both unconscious and fully aware) arises from our bodies, senses, and memory of similar events together with memories of self (our physical boundaries, discrimination between self and not-self activities, mirror neurons etc) we have a top level consciousness which is effectively a narrative explanation we tell ourselves from our individual point of view.

After the first few experiences of life we get locked into the recursive tale we tell ourselves, and remember it as a long running and persistant narrative. This feeling we call consciousness.

So in answer to the original question, no, I don't think there is a hard problem of consciousness. I do think it very likely that many people will find it very hard to accept the nature of consciousness - a tale we tell ourselves to explain away the 95% of our thoughts which are unconscious. Our consciousness has an evolutionary utility in that it provides a capability of allowing us to sometimes second guess ourselves.

Unweaving the rainbow? There is no rainbow, just as there is no Santa Claus.

The Mind lives completely outside of the body/brain, in an entirely different dimension. Quantum Physics is now teaching us that there may be as many as twenty seven different dimensions. Of course, we can only experience three of them. So, trying to study the Mind-Brain problem is fruitless. Scientists will never find our Minds. It cannot happen. We cannot observe outside of 3D, so how are we to study this?

Internationally recognized Brain researcher Sir John Eccles once wrote, "... that the mind is a separate entity from the brain, and that mental processes cannot be reduced to neurochemical brain processes, but on the contrary direct them. And... a mind may conceivably exist without a brain." There is a growing number of scientists that are sharing this idea.

Many laugh at this notion, labeling it "Sci-Fi". But think about it. If our Mind truly lives within the brain, how can one experience thought during clinical death (ie Cardiac Arrest)? Doctor's Sam Parnia and Peter Fenwick, leading researchers in the field of NDEs and the Consciousness debate, describe patients that are clinically dead experiencing a vivid dream or awareness. Many explain that the lack of oxygen or the heavy drugs play a role. However, in many cases, the brain is dead. There are no signals being transmitted during clinical death (about 20-40 seconds in, all activity ceases). But several patients describe amazing details of the OR room, the actual procedures, etc. There are too many cases documented to dismiss. Find more at the site (http://horizonresearch.org/).

Although no one truly has the answer, the above information is probably the best guess (or, at least, best documented).