Some people think they have/want/need “Cartesian qualia” that are the unique things our singular “I” sees when it gets information about the world
So I think I agree that there are no ontologically fundamental qualia in the world. But I have a certain amount of sympathy with people who want to consider qualia to be nonetheless real...like yeah, on one level there seem to be no fundamental qualia in physics, on another level the whole point of physics is to provide an explanation of our experiences, so it seems weird to demote those experiences to a lesser degree of reality.
Say you’re a string-compressing robot. Which is more ‘real’, the raw string you’re fed, or the program you devise to compress it? Overall I don’t think you can say either—both are needed for the function of string compression to be carried out. Similarly, I think both our experiences and world-model seem necessary for our existence as world-modeling beings. Maybe the problem is that the word ‘real’ is too coarse, we need some kind of finer-grained vocabulary for different levels of our ontology.
So I think I agree that there are no ontologically fundamental qualia in the world. But I have a certain amount of sympathy with people who want to consider qualia to be nonetheless real...like yeah, on one level there seem to be no fundamental qualia in physics, on another level the whole point of physics is to provide an explanation of our experiences, so it seems weird to demote those experiences to a lesser degree of reality.
Say you’re a string-compressing robot. Which is more ‘real’, the raw string you’re fed, or the program you devise to compress it? Overall I don’t think you can say either—both are needed for the function of string compression to be carried out. Similarly, I think both our experiences and world-model seem necessary for our existence as world-modeling beings. Maybe the problem is that the word ‘real’ is too coarse, we need some kind of finer-grained vocabulary for different levels of our ontology.