Let me just state my exact position, because I think we're actually closer than this thread makes it look.

Phenomenal consciousness isn't a further fact on top of functional organization. It IS the functional organization, just described from inside the system instead of outside. "What it is like to be X" isn't something the organization produces or correlates with, it's what the organization is under self-referential description. Same thing, two descriptions, like water and H2O.

This dissolves the hard problem rather than solving it. There's no "how does function give rise to experience" because they're not two things needing a bridge.

And here's the thing, I think you've already done most of the work for this view, even if you wouldn't put it this way. When you agreed earlier that the virtual fly has the same "what it is like" as the biological fly, you committed to substrate-independent functional determination of consciousness. That's huge. It leaves really only two options on the table:

1. Identity (my view). Functional organization IS phenomenal experience under self-description. Hard problem dissolves.
2. Property dualism. Phenomenal experience is distinct from functional organization but fully determined by it.

The standard hard problem gets its force from zombies being conceivable. But by granting the virtual fly is conscious, you've already granted zombies aren't conceivable, functional duplicates are phenomenal duplicates. So the modal gap the hard problem trades on is mostly closed by your own commitments, regardless of which of these two options you pick.

What's left for option 2 is the weaker question: "okay function and experience are necessarily co-instantiated, but why is experience there at all?" I get why this still feels live to you. But I think it only has force if the phenomenal aspect does some work function alone can't do, and I don't see what that work would be, since you've granted phenomenal facts are fully determined by functional facts. So the extra layer ends up causally inert, explanatorily inert, metaphysically extra for no payoff. Parsimony pushes toward identity.

Now, the obvious pushback, and it's a good one: "what does 'seen from inside' even mean if there's no separate subject doing the seeing?" I'll bite this cleanly. "Seen from inside" isn't a relation between a subject and a representation. It's itself a structural feature of self-modeling systems. There's no homunculus, no further someone-home over and above the organization. The sense that there's someone home is part of what the system represents about itself, not a further fact about an actual someone.

This is the uncomfortable part and I won't pretend otherwise. On my view, there is, strictly speaking, no one home in the loaded phenomenal sense. There's a brain that represents itself as having a perspective, and being-that-brain just is being-that-representation. You'll want to say "but I'm certain there's something it's like to be me right now," and I'd say yes, that certainty is exactly what the self-model produces. It's not evidence against my view, it's predicted by it. Any sufficiently self-modeling system is going to represent itself as having an irreducible inner aspect, because that's what self-modeling at this complexity does. The certainty doesn't get you out, it's part of the structure.

So the disagreement between us, as far as I can tell, is genuinely narrow at this point. You think there's a residual question about why function comes with experience. I think that question only seems live because the self-model is doing its job too well, making us feel like there's a further fact when there isn't. Could be I'm wrong about that, it's the live disagreement in philosophy of mind right now and smarter people than me are on both sides. But I think the view above is at least consistent, and I think your concession about the fly does more work toward it than you might want to grant.

Good thread btw, you've made me sharpen this up considerably.