A long time ago, we had souls. That was the name we put on everything we don’t understand about human inner life or why they behave the way they do.
With time, various religions appropriated our souls with the promise to provide really nice real estate for them after our physical bodies are no longer. In return, we were obliged to follow some rules, most of them written, but if you obey whoever is in charge, that’s your ticket.
With the Renaissance and the development of sciences, we couldn’t maintain the term soul any longer; it was too much religiously charged. It was gradually renamed to consciousness. Nevertheless, the sentiment of the mysterious inner life of humans was very attractive purely from an ego-preserving perspective.
In order to prevent various curious minds from deconstructing it and reducing our “divine” inner making to some clock-like machinery. Philosophers have a special way to prevent that from happening: declare consciousness to be qualia. Nothing on the surface or even deeper cannot deconstruct qualia because qualia is undeconstructable by definition. We can discuss any observable features, but to have qualia, you need a “special sauce” or essence, which is again simply the name of our ignorance about our inner life.
Here is an illustration of how the qualia of consciousness work. A thought experiment, imagine a being which looks like us, behaves like us and claims to be conscious, but actually everything is pretended (simulated). The being has no personal experiences nor internal life, and everything is just an act. This is called “philosophical zombie”. There is no way (by definition) for us to detect such a being because there is no way to enter someone’s mind (even with fMRI) and see what their experiences are.
Having such protection of our consciousness works well on a social level. For example, how to judge someone is that someone was with diminished cognitive capacities (less conscious) at the time of… Do we need to recognise animal rights or soon enough AI rights, if they do not conform with our understanding of consciousness? With the rise of AI, I don’t think we can keep our precious ego intact much longer. Prepare to open your mind one last time!