Consciousness work needs better instruments
The hard part is not having theories. The hard part is building measurements that don't flatten the thing you care about.
A lot of conversations about consciousness collapse into a familiar loop: one side offers a theory, the other side asks for evidence, and everyone quietly smuggles in a different definition of what would count as evidence in the first place.
That is why I keep coming back to instrumentation.
Not instrumentation in the narrow sense of more sensors at any cost, but in the deeper sense of designing measurements that preserve enough structure to stay honest. The problem is not that we lack frameworks. We have no shortage of frameworks. The problem is that subjective experience is easy to trivialize when you force it into tools built for cleaner domains.
This is where systems thinking still helps. Before debating explanation, ask what the interface is. What is being observed? At what resolution? Under which distortions? With what incentives to overclaim?
Better instruments would not end the argument, but they might at least let us disagree on top of the same data.