>>10895152So far there's no such thing as "the" scientific explanation for qualia.
"Qualia" is itself a controversial concept, and among the theories that accept it there is no consensus on an explanation much less a scientific one.
I tend to think qualia don't exist. Qualia are supposed to be qualities belonging to conscious states themselves, but the qualities people identify to motivate this idea probably rather belong to the things we are conscious of. So feeling physical pain would be being aware of a state of the body, and being aware of it in a certain way which probably also involves other mental states such as desires. Something like that.
Either way I would be very surprised if the hard problem weren't based on a misunderstanding. The problem makes a distinction between (A) mental processes explicable entirely in computational and neurophysiological terms and (B) phenomenal consciousness, then it claims that the former could occur without the latter, and then it asks why we nevertheless find both.
This means that the hard problem makes two major assumptions that could both be false: that all mental processes can be sorted into categories A and B, and that A does not imply B.
In all likelihood, both assumptions are indeed false. Already today, if you reread Chalmers's original formulation of the problem, his language sounds outdated, specifically his assumption that computational and neurophysiological explanations are sufficient for all the standard topics of cognitive science.
