> His attitude would be fine if it really did seem like there was nothing more to be learned about consciousness.

On the contrary, he's just saying that conscious is not an irreducible phenomenon like some of his philosophical contemporaries believe. There's still a lot to learn about the reduction. In fact, his is the less lazy way out, because how consciousness reduces to physical laws is completely unknown, but if you take consciousness as irreducible in some way, then you have nothing else to explain: consciousness just is.