Every method of inquiry I can think of works by getting outside its object. A biologist steps back from the cell to see it through a microscope. A physicist places the particle in a detector she is not part of. A historian reads documents written by people who are dead, from a vantage the documents themselves never had. The observer stands apart from the observed, and that apartness is what lets the observation count as evidence rather than participation.
Consciousness will not allow this. There is no experiment I can run that places me outside my own experiencing while it happens, because the placing itself would have to be experienced. I can turn attention onto attention, watch a thought arise, but the watching still occurs within the very thing I wanted to step outside of. This is not a technological limitation, waiting on a better instrument. It looks structural.
Third-person study of consciousness has made real progress, and it would be a mistake to treat that progress as somehow beside the point. We can watch, with increasing precision, which patterns of neural activity correlate with a subject reporting that she sees red, or feels pain, or has lost the ability to form new memories. Damage to particular regions reliably removes particular capacities: the ability to recognize faces, to feel fear, to bind a scene together into one coherent visual field. These correlations are not trivial. They tell a patient's family something clinically important, and they tell theorists something real about how experience is organized in a brain rather than floating free of one.
What they do not do, and what no added resolution seems likely to do on its own, is answer why any of that activity is accompanied by something it is like to undergo it, rather than occurring in the dark, functionally identical but experientially empty. A description of firing patterns, however complete, is a description in the third person. The gap between that description and the first-person fact of experiencing is not closed by adding detail to the description. It is a different kind of question, sitting at a different address.
The first-person side has its own limits, just as severe. My experience is available to me with a directness no report can match, but it comes with no way to check it against anyone else's. I can tell you what red looks like to me only by comparison, by pointing at tomatoes and stop signs, never by handing you the experience itself to inspect. Meditative traditions have spent long stretches of time refining first-person attention, developing genuinely disciplined methods for observing the texture of experience with more care than an untrained mind manages. But refinement of the instrument does not solve the problem of the instrument being unable to leave the room it is measuring.
None of this licenses a leap to something outside physical explanation, a ghost slipped in to fill the gap. It is also not a reason to call the third-person project useless. A map that cannot show you what a country feels like to live in is still, within its own terms, an honest map. It is simply the one place inquiry runs into itself, looking for a window and finding, instead, more room.