Personally I think it’s silly as hell. Qualia is obviously a biological component of experience… Not some weird thing that science will never be able to put in to words.
I’ve been listening to a lot of psychology podcasts lately and for some reason people seem obsessed with the idea despite you needing to make the same logical leaps to believe it as any sort of mysticism… Maybe I am just tripping idk
What do you mean you’re not sure qualia is real? Are you a meat automaton acting entirely on instinct with no subjective experiences whatsoever? You’ve never felt pain or pleasure or experienced a flavor?
I don’t hold this view, but it sounds like eliminativism or illusionism
it is something that cannot be defined… like … by definition. That seems like a poor explanatory tool, and it also seems like a non-falsifiable heuristic . I don’t think whether it is real or not means we lack free will, and honestly I think conflating the two is a pretty spurious claim. Qualia is a subjective “thing” that sort of implies a dualism, but does not actually imply free will. You are assuming that free will = subjective experience and I never implied that. The brain is incredibly complex and we don’t really have a consistent understanding of consciousness, so qualia may as well be called “ether” or “impetus” … Its just as likely that the mind itself is something like an incredibly complex set of biological state-machines and consciousness necessarily implies the relationship between that organism and the environment it is situated in. But none of that necessitates a superimposed “what its like” phenomenon that is a particular object that is simultaneously inexplicable and necessary for “being”