What we should be doing instead is trying to explain just how we have been set up—and why.

[...]

1. What exactly is the real-world brain activity that we are engaging with when we say a sensation is like something?

2. Why does this activity have the (tricky) properties it has, such that our experience of it is seemingly something so strangely private, not of this world, and indescribable in common terms?

3. What makes this trick work? How is it done?

4. What is the point? Why was it designed like this? What might have been the evolutionary advantage of our having these marvelous experiences?

I believe we can already propose plausible answers to each of these questions—although they are all quite radical.
Here they are.

Yet I want to suggest the role of phenomenal consciousness may not be like this at all. Its role may not be to enable us to do something we could not do otherwise, but rather to encourage us to do something we would not do otherwise: to make us take an interest in things that otherwise would not interest us, or to mind things we otherwise would not mind, or to set ourselves goals we otherwise would not set.