The Hard Problem of Consciousness: Feelings?

Continuation on recent posts on consciousness.

David Chalmers in The Character of Consciousness identifies Easy Problems of Consciousness EPC (see PS below) as those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The Hard Problems of Consciousness HPC are those that seem to resist those methods, more precisely:

• The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. 
• This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. 
• Then there are bodily sensations from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion; and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
• What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions. To see this, note that even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?

Chalmers evidently connects feelings to experience: An organism able to observe/experience things while completely lacking any form of feelings, would not be considered to be conscious, more like a robot. 

We may have the idea that a fish is not conscious and in particular has no feeling of pain and so can be killed without any remorse. On the other hand, a human being often overwhelmed by feelings, would be the prime example of a conscious being. 

What to say about this? Well, a simple idea is that we are equipped with feelings to help us survive in a variable environment. We feel pain when hit by an enemy arrow and so seek protection behind a shield and we feel love to reproduce, or more generally seek pleasure of both body and soul. The role of feelings is to make us focus on something important for survival, as not only a note from the bank that our account shows minus but as a hit in solar plexus.  

Of course any living organism could be expected to benefit from feelings and so from this perspective even a simple flatworm can feel pain and so be conscious in this sense.

It seems that HPC does not select human consciousness as special, which instead connects to the EPC of cognitive capacities. 

I have been led to an idea of consciousness as a brain representation/model of an exterior reality, which is constructed from sensory input/experience from the body, which ultimately is connected to sensations of pain or pleasure as lack of pain. The mind model then does not only have an exterior source, but also a bodily representation as (stomach) feeling.

Many books have been written on both EPC and HPC without any clear agreement. 

Again: Is self-consciousness an emergent cultural phenomenon? If you are fully occupied with survival of the group, do you have time/need for self-introspection?

PS The easy problems of consciousness, according to Chalmers, include those of explaining the following phenomena:

•  ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli
•  integration of information by a cognitive system
•  reportability of mental states
•  ability of a system to access its own internal states
•  focus of attention
•  deliberate control of behavior
• difference between wakefulness and sleep