> Saying it is a quantum of subjective experience explains nothing because then you have to properly define experience in general.
Qualia is experience.
Rocks don't experience things, they perform chemical reactions according to physics. In a world without qualia, there is no such thing as experience. The hard question is how chemical reactions result in something like experience. There's no logical, causal relationship we can find as to why a chemical reaction should result in one.
And even though we don't know much about what experience is or how it works, we seem to be universally aware of it. In fact we seem to have a mechanism to directly observe it. This is another thing that's weird to us and that makes "experience" special and interesting, because it's atypical - usually we can only observe things through external means; sight, touch, etc...
With "experience", this is reversed - almost as if by gaining the ability to directly observe a thing, we lose the ability to externally observe it. There is significant debate over this is an inherent property of the thing or whether advances in our measurement tools will allow us to either inderectly observe the thing, or at least observe its effects.
You're coming into this with the assumption that the ability to communicate about a thing is a prerequisite to that thing existing. It's not. The map describes the territory, not the other way around.
We don't have good definitions of what consciousness is, which is why it's hard and why physicists and philosophers want to study it. It's a thing that we can see and we are trying to learn its properties. As we learn those properties we continue to attempt to map it into another medium - language.
Qualia is experience.
Rocks don't experience things, they perform chemical reactions according to physics. In a world without qualia, there is no such thing as experience. The hard question is how chemical reactions result in something like experience. There's no logical, causal relationship we can find as to why a chemical reaction should result in one.
And even though we don't know much about what experience is or how it works, we seem to be universally aware of it. In fact we seem to have a mechanism to directly observe it. This is another thing that's weird to us and that makes "experience" special and interesting, because it's atypical - usually we can only observe things through external means; sight, touch, etc...
With "experience", this is reversed - almost as if by gaining the ability to directly observe a thing, we lose the ability to externally observe it. There is significant debate over this is an inherent property of the thing or whether advances in our measurement tools will allow us to either inderectly observe the thing, or at least observe its effects.
You're coming into this with the assumption that the ability to communicate about a thing is a prerequisite to that thing existing. It's not. The map describes the territory, not the other way around.
We don't have good definitions of what consciousness is, which is why it's hard and why physicists and philosophers want to study it. It's a thing that we can see and we are trying to learn its properties. As we learn those properties we continue to attempt to map it into another medium - language.