It has been my perspective that the experience (and thus existence) of qualia is completely consistent with physical materialism.
It was in a thread about theism, which I don’t want to pick up, but in a tangent about qualia here I argued that “beauty” existed (physically) when an observer has a special sort of experience in response to the subjective observation of a pattern. The special sort of experience—just now read from “ESR’s New Take on Qualia”—is incommunicable but an experience we learn over time to associate with the label “beauty”.
Probably my comment that I linked to is too confusing. The confusing part is that I was trying to explain where the “meaningfulness” comes from in our experience of qualia. I was describing a hypothesis that the feeling of “Wow!” comes from the (subjective) experience of “significant” pattern (subjectively considered significant). So “Wow!” is a qualia response you may have in response to the experience of the qualia “beauty”. So “beauty” is a feeling about the pattern of whatever is being thought beautiful, and the “wow!” is a feeling about the pattern of beauty (the experience of beauty) itself.
It has been my perspective that the experience (and thus existence) of qualia is completely consistent with physical materialism.
It was in a thread about theism, which I don’t want to pick up, but in a tangent about qualia here I argued that “beauty” existed (physically) when an observer has a special sort of experience in response to the subjective observation of a pattern. The special sort of experience—just now read from “ESR’s New Take on Qualia”—is incommunicable but an experience we learn over time to associate with the label “beauty”.
Probably my comment that I linked to is too confusing. The confusing part is that I was trying to explain where the “meaningfulness” comes from in our experience of qualia. I was describing a hypothesis that the feeling of “Wow!” comes from the (subjective) experience of “significant” pattern (subjectively considered significant). So “Wow!” is a qualia response you may have in response to the experience of the qualia “beauty”. So “beauty” is a feeling about the pattern of whatever is being thought beautiful, and the “wow!” is a feeling about the pattern of beauty (the experience of beauty) itself.