I think you have that mixed around. Basic awareness/consciousness/awareness is not especially notable or exciting, it's incredibly common and many aspects are well understood.
Self-awareness, an actual consciousness and inner voice, is exceedingly rare and poorly understood, and I think it would therefore be significantly more fascination since so much is yet to be discovered and understood.
> There is no “hard problem of self-awareness”.
Well, there is. The type of consciousness being referred to in "Hard problem of consciousness" is of a type that would require self-awareness as a prerequisite to exist. It's almost synonymous with it.
> Whereas with sentience (awareness), we have no explanation for why any physical state is sentient rather than nonsentient.
You're using these terms in a way that seems unorthodox, but unless I'm misunderstanding your point, we do understand, the answer is brain development and evolution.
This is of course not meant as proof or knowledge of any kind, but just that the way I’m using the words is what the “average” of how people in books and on the internet would use those words.
I don’t understand how “evolution and brain development” cause sensations to arise. What part of our biology is the part directly producing sentience experience? How would you explain why we experience anything instead of nothing? Can we replicate it in a non-biological system?
Self-awareness, an actual consciousness and inner voice, is exceedingly rare and poorly understood, and I think it would therefore be significantly more fascination since so much is yet to be discovered and understood.
> There is no “hard problem of self-awareness”.
Well, there is. The type of consciousness being referred to in "Hard problem of consciousness" is of a type that would require self-awareness as a prerequisite to exist. It's almost synonymous with it.
> Whereas with sentience (awareness), we have no explanation for why any physical state is sentient rather than nonsentient.
You're using these terms in a way that seems unorthodox, but unless I'm misunderstanding your point, we do understand, the answer is brain development and evolution.