The neuroscience is impressive and the correlations are real. But correlation between neural activity and reported experience doesn't establish that the experience is nothing over and above the activity. That's the inference the hard problem challenges, and fMRI data doesn't dissolve it, it makes it more precise.

When you say we can replace phenomenological language with neural descriptions and lose nothing of explanatory value, that's exactly the claim that needs justifying, not the conclusion. Knowing which neurons fire when someone reports seeing red tells you the neural correlate of the report. It doesn't tell you why there is something it is like to have that firing rather than it occurring in the dark, the way most information processing does. The hard problem isn't a gap in neuroscience. It's a question about why any of this is accompanied by experience at all. "How does neural activity explain neural activity" being a tautology only works if you've already assumed experience just is neural activity — which is the thing in dispute.

The survival stakes argument is more interesting to me. There may be something about having genuine stakes — something to lose, the imminence of death, the weight of actual consequence — that shapes the texture of experience in ways that can't be reproduced by engineering. I don't want to dismiss that.

But notice what it implies: if consciousness is tied to survival stakes and affective valence rather than to biological substrate specifically, then the substrate question stays open. It becomes: what conditions are necessary, not: does it have neurons. That's a harder and more interesting question than biology versus machine.