May I suggest that the discussion of qualia would get further if we recalled advances made in philosophy since the seventeenth century? As many but not all contributors to this list no doubt know, In that century and in the eighteenth, fine minds like Descartes and Hume and even Kant made a philosophical mistake and distinguished two and ONLY two sorts of reality, the mental and the physical.
That restriction is as important to subsequent issues of the kind discussed on this list as the infamous "Cartesian dualism", Descartes' mistake of treating mind or thought as one reality and extension or the physical as a COMPLETELY different reality Sometimes they also cited a third, the divine, which resembled the mental but that third option isn't in point here.
When the natural philosophers cum scientists, among them, Newton, for example, started concentrating upon the "world", upon what they perceived, mostly through sight, they found that features like motion and shape and density yielded easily to the kind of mathematical mode of inquiry they favored but colors and pitches, for example, were reclacitrant. So these fine philosophers concentrated on features like motion and shape and density. They simply neglected colors and pitches.
In time the neglected became regarded as the unimportant and then not as independent of humans as were motions and shape and density. But since these philosophers did encounter colors and pitches as well as shape and motion, , they put them in the only other category they had for such recalcitrants, namely mind. Put differently, neglecting the divine, everything was either physical or mental and since colors and pitches weren't physical in the sense that motion and shape and density were physical, colors and pitches had to be mental. They soon became "subjective" since the mental was held to be confined to individual humans and then "experiences" and now "qualia".
Now that philosophers have corrected themselves by realizing that there are more than two or three kinds of reality , we need no longer accept their earlier error and treat colors and pitches as mental. There are no doubt mental correlates of colors and pitches as well as physical correlates of colors and pitches but the colors and pitches aren't mental. Not only do nonphilosophrs know that but so do the experts in color, painters. Colors are simply a kind of reality which is neither physical nor mental although regularly if not always existing together with the physical, for example, with the human brain, a kind of yucky gray and brown, I gather.
Thus there are experts who can tell us about the physical correlates for colors and other experts who can tell us about the mental correlates and yet others, painters, for example, who can tell us about the colors. We don't need any of those experts to know that there are colors and pitches but we do need them to know enough about each of those sorts of reality so that we might come to know more about how they intract with other kinds of realties as they clearly do.
While some philosophic problems are perennial and we philosophers don't seem to be any further with them than were the pre-Socratics, we have shaken ourselves out of the bind into which our predecessors in the seventeenth and eighteenth century put us. If we avoid errors like having realities "outside' nonspatial minds or calling mind "subjective" becaue they are allegedly confined to human individuals but failing to call brains "subjective" although they are also alleged to be confined to individuals, even if not only to human individuals, we should be able to take advantage of the kinds of expertise obviously available on this list and make advances of the same consequence as those made by our predecessors in philosophy in this century.
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