Earnest question, would like to follow along:

Are there any serious people working directly on the hard problem of consciousness with scientific methods and tools?

imho the hard problem of consciousness feels like a tautology-- no satisfying answer is possible because only non-physical subjective phenomena are admissible and those do not generalize

im in the hard problem denier camp

This is spot on. Science and all its tools are based on a shared, objective world. One can’t use the tools very well to study the subjective nature of consciousness, which only exists “on the inside.”

Still we are making some headway in the kinds of processing the brain can do to create those experiences. 

Similarly, we know how to create an LLM, but we will never know what it is to be an LLM.