>It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.

It's that you can't even measure it, since the way it's defined as a subjective experience, no external measure could ever capture it. This is what gives rise to the p-zombie argument.

To get rid of that you have to accept "functional qualia" as basically equivalent to qualia, which solves the p-zombie issue and resolves half of the hard problem. From there, explaining consciousness is no "harder" than explaining other scale-depedent phenomenon in complex systems like LLMs: still hard, but at least tractable with scientific measurements and experiments.