I think Chalmers is the one who started calling it (for better or worse) the "hard problem". And that means he might be one of the first (in the modern age) to clearly distinguish it from the other problems of consciousness. Though of course some people (zombies?) like Dennet claim there is no distinction.

There is also another perspective: by creating the concept of "hard problem" of consciousness and that of "p-zombies", Chalmers led a whole generation of philosophers on a dead end. It leads to no insights even after decades of development, it's too impractical and divorced from science.

I think we should try to create intelligent AI agents in order to understand what consciousness is, and reconsider behaviourism and scientific approaches, as opposed to this kind of sterile dualism.

tl;dr: In essence, if I gather this correctly just from the comments and a bit of common sense, Chalmers claimed that a whole body of philosophy was unscientific, to which the main culprit replied that this was completely subjective and that subjectivity cannot be taken out of the equation, which would be what Chalmers implied.

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The hard problem of consciousness is being conscious, which involves a lot more than awareness of self-consciousness.

To me, I'm the only consciousness in sight. Everyone else is just objects. If I share an experience, I incorporate that as my own from my own perspective. There is little need to tell other people that they are conscious. This is rather a result of social dynamics, which I am alas not very conscious about.

The tipping point is if I perceive myself, my body, my actions (rather the results) as objects. That means I was not aware of those objects, didn't anticipate them, so I must have been rather unconscious. This is in a sense a loss of identity (in the sense of in+dent, interleaving, interlocking, etc.). The goal of consciousness is to redirect the subconsciousness, to avoid unconsciousness and uncertainty, simply because of pain and fear and painful fear, so there is an effective feedback loop. There is an incentive against active thought: it's a huge energetic burden. Obviously it has it's uses, but we can think passively, kinda -- e.g. to remember something long after having actively thought about it; or to meet a default decision to direct attention towards something. So there is a real incentive against consciousness. I can only guess, that opponents, are actually getting a headache of thinking on too many meta levels and energy restraints typically lead to anger, which might move them into a bad light, where it's hard to distinguish between hyperbole and hypothesis.

At that, there is no distinction "from the other problems of consciousness" insofar discussion is concerned, because talk is conscious. So Dennet pulls a short circuit and claims that all talk about consciousness is inherently conscious, whereas on the subconscious level actions speak louder than words and he provocatively takes the opportunity to verbalize such a subconscious action (refusal, opposition, repulsion, feeling insulted, fatigued or ...) -- still to further the discussion, out of a subconscious desire, professional or habitually.

This is really cute, because Dennet assumes the position of the antagonist, giving an adversarial example to learn from, implicating that not all of his arguments are wrong, probably hoping that the further discussion will converge to a language he can support. Ultimately, if he says that there is no problem, he implicitly admits that Chalmers already had solved it. And if he says that there is no distinction, he implies that the conscious can not be treated in isolation from the subconscious.

So he is naturally admitting, that his research is not perfect, ie. not done.

The problem, the working of the brain is certainly nonlinear so there can be no clear line as separation. It's a process, not a state, and so he keeps processing the problem, maintaining the illusion of progress.

Nihilism is the ground state of philosophy. He doesn't fall back on it, he was already there, and he shows the whole field that they haven't come very far, philosophically -- which is not bad, because constancy is the psychological end-goal. From the natural sciences, physics reinforces subjectivity as a necessary epistemology, while neuro-science is the subject moving the fastest, figuratively speaking.

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I would usually not post such a long reply, but I feel your insult was out of line and the topic is generally interesting enough. Yeah, I'm rambling.