If the hard problem of consciousness is unanswerable, is it a hard problem or just a bad question?

For centuries nobody had a clue of what life could be or what even constituted life? It was obvious what was alive and what not. It had a similar chasm between lifeless matter and living organisms as we now experience with the hard problem. Henri Bergson used the term élan vital or life force to distinguish the animate from the inanimate. A belief known as vitalism stated:

living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things.

By 1931, vitalism was all but dead. Of course we can not be sure that the Hard Problem will go the same way but I think the demise of vitalism is a warning to not give up so easily. Some philosphers, however, do think that the Hard Problem cannot be resolved by man. It is called mysterianism.

As first described by Chalmers, the hard problem is not unanswerable. He described it as a fairly concrete and specific demand for a physics-like theory of consciousness.

See: Can the hard problem of consciousness, in principle, be answered with a mathematical formula?

Some people have interpreted the hard problem of consciousness as something that physically-based theories of consciousness will forever fail to resolve. They've taken it up as a shield against materialism; they say, "yes, maybe you can say HOW but you can never say WHY!" And what exactly would be the "why" to satisfy such people? Nothing would satisfy them! They will always allude mysteriously to something beyond science.

But Chalmers, who introduced the hard problem of consciousness, did not have that kind of unmeetable standard in mind. Chalmers was actually quite friendly to physically-based theories of consciousness.

Chalmers described the hard problem of consciousness as a problem of finding physics-like mathematical laws that describe the relationship between a physical system and the qualia produced by that system. These laws might be compared to the laws that describe the relationship between a set of moving charges and the electromagnetic forces produced on those charges. They're just formulas we could write on paper; writing those formulas, according to Chalmers, could be a potential solution to the hard problem of consciousness.

Here's a quote from Chalmers about the kind of theory that might qualify as a solution to the hard problem of consciousness:

There is nothing particularly spiritual or mystical about this theory—its overall shape is like that of a physical theory, with a few fundamental entities connected by fundamental laws. It expands the ontology slightly, to be sure, but Maxwell did the same thing. Indeed, the overall structure of this position is entirely naturalistic, allowing that ultimately the universe comes down to a network of basic entities obeying simple laws, and allowing that there may ultimately be a theory of consciousness cast in terms of such laws.

The mind-body problem is puzzling to us, but for all we know, its solution could be very simple. Remember Christopher Colombus' egg? The solution was objectively very simple, yet nobody at the Spanish Court could find it... Some of them might even have assumed that the problem was unsolvable.

I guess they might have called it "the hard problem of how to make an egg stand", until Colombus showed them the solution.

As for your proposal to drop the question entirely, that is, in fact, what most people do. They can't find an answer to this question, so they move on; they stop thinking about it. And that's their prerogative.

Others, though, keep chewing on it. One way of doing just that is to rephrase the question, again and again until it becomes a "good question". To reframe the problem until it becomes solvable. For instance, personally I would not speak of "how physical processes can generate a first person experience" but "how biological processes can generate a person's experience". It seems important to me that the biological nature of cognition is recognized, because life is already a sort of cognition, using languages like DNA. To consider the mind-body problem as physical is IMO mistaken. It's a biology problem.

One does not need to speculate about the state of the hard problem of consciousness. If it is the question

How does an organism benefit from the development that some of his mental processes are conscious?

then the hard problem of consciousness is the legitime question for the biological function of a specific capability developed during the biological evolution.

The "Hard Problem of Consciousness" is that consciousness is real and functional, and all efforts to explain this under physicalism have failed.

The problem is that physicalism asserts as dogma that consciousness cannot be causal on matter. Yet the only way to explain the evolutionarily tuned nature of consciousness is to admit to its causal efficacy.

The Hard Problem stands in the same relation to physicalism as the similarly intractable Problem of Evil stands relative to an omni-deity. Another name for a "hard problem" is a refuting test case.

The nature of consciousness that we have discovered thru methodological naturalism, is incompatible with physicalism. This is only a problem if one is a dogmatist, and refuses to reject theories when they are refuted.

It is a poor question that conflates ontology and epistemology.

Physical objects and events (Popper's World 1) are the ontology of reality, what actually exists and happens.

Experiences and other mental processes (Popper's World 2) are the epistemology of reality, what the person knows, feels and believes about it.