@Pat It’s been tried. Issue is, consciousness is hard to define well enough to study it, to subject it to rigorous scientific inquire. And as of late it seems it can’t be understood without the embodiment. So at some point schools of thought become ensembles of premises and cherrypicked facts that one is asked to accept, but aren’t actionable.
Yeah, you need to agree on a definition for sure. I think using more precise terms like awareness or self-awareness may help. As you say, the only way to objectively study it and formulate testable hypotheses is to establish correlates to some measurable physical phenomenon like specific neural activity.
Also, I think differentiation between conscious and unconscious thought may be useful also, to compare how that looks as neural activity. But I think they work together on most conscious tasks, so that might difficult to sort out. Unconscious thought is easier to find because the brain enters states where there is no conscious thought at all.
I really have no idea what’s out there in the literature, as I haven’t done much reading on this at all. Maybe all this has already been done.
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When I read this, I immediately thought of the matter/energy waves of Quantum Mechanics and how QM represents the uncertainty of quantum states using probablility distributions. I wonder if that approach would work with the hard problem of consciousness.