What is qualia? I've never heard that word before, and I don't want to go down some weird rabbit hole and get lost. Got any references you could share?
Qualia means the experience of a particular sensation, like colors, sounds, pains. It's not a sleight-of-hand. We do have those experiences. The difficulty is that they are subjective.
I think you're going to find it a very hard sell to convince me that I don't experience qualia. I don't know what it's like to feel pain? I don't experience sight, or sound, or abstract thoughts and beliefs, as subjective experiences?
The problem with qualia, subjective consciousness, and all their near-synonyms is that they're almost impossible to define non-self-referentially. That doesn't mean they don't exist, though - and all human experience is indication that they do.
Qualia are one of the more interesting subjects in the study of mind because they're inextricable from our perceptions and our experience of everything, but they can't be reduced or quantified in any meaningful way.
(If anyone is tempted to respond to this with anything from Daniel Dennett, please consider citing a serious philosopher instead.)
It seems clear to me that qualia must affect physical reality. If it didn't, we wouldn't be talking about it. If it was just a byproduct with causality going only in one direction, then we'd never talk about it, because the behavior of a physical system with that byproduct would be identical to that same physical system without it. There has to be a causal chain from this discussion back to qualia, unless the discussion happened by coincidence, which is extremely unlikely.
I don't think this tells us anything about what qualia is or whether it is or isn't a material process, but I don't think it's tenable to say that it either doesn't exist entirely, or exists but doesn't affect anything.
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