Thanks Cristóbal for the thoughtful response. Definitely plenty there to take into account which I will.

I'm actually new to philosophy of mind and I got to thinking about this after reading Galileo's Error by Phillip Goff and listening to some of Daniel Dennett's take on consciousness being "the brain's illusion of itself." Dennett specifically got me thinking because it seems to me that to say consciousness is merely an illusion we would need to be able to say something about the substance of that illusion, just like we can describe the substance of the illusions produced by recorded audio or video.

I guess this kind of touches on the idea of zombies as well. A computer obviously can produce an image but the computer does not have an experience of the image. But why not? If it has all of the info processing capability necessary to produce the same illusions that we do, how is it that we are conscious and it is not? Those types of questions lead me to think that the most mind boggling question of consciousness is not so much the "how" or the "why" but the "what." Reading Goff's book gave me an idea of how we might think about that question, even if his answer (panpsychism) isn't the right one. Although if you know of any other good books/articles on that question, I'd love to read them.