In an interview with John Horgan at Scientific American:
Horgan: Is consciousness a scientifically tractable problem? Do you favor any current approaches and theories?
Dawkins: It certainly isn’t tractable by me. At times I find myself inspired by the confidence of my friend Daniel Dennett. At other times I lean towards his fellow philosopher Colin McGinn’s pessimism: the view that the human mind is flatly incapable of understanding its own consciousness. Our brains evolved to understand how to survive in a hunter–gatherer way of life on the African savanna—understand the behavior of an extremely narrow range of medium-sized objects travelling at medium velocities. It is therefore a wonder, as [cognitive scientist] Steven Pinker has pointed out, that our brains have advanced to the heights of relativity and quantum mechanics. Maybe this should give us Dennettian confidence. Or maybe the “hard problem” of consciousness is forever beyond us, just as calculus is forever beyond the mentality of a chimpanzee. More.
It’s a real breakthrough that such people even see the problem. So many funded small minds don’t and continue to burble up trivia. It does their cause no good, and then other small minds invent tricks or punishments to try to force people to believe apart from evidence.
See also: Would we give up naturalism to solve the hard problem of consciousness?
What great physicists have said about immateriality and consciousness
and
Richard Dawkins on the reproducibility crisis in science