Dualists tend to have the intuition that it's an absolute quality--or at least, something with a special status beyond a higher-order description of patterns in

Dualists tend to have the intuition that it's an absolute quality--or at least, something with a special status beyond a higher-order description of patterns in physical activity. Your turbulence example is perfect: I can't imagine a fishtank that is atom-for-atom identical to a system that's experiencing turbulence, but somehow isn't "really" turbulent. I can easily imagine a system that is in the exact same state as my brain, but isn't having any internal experiences. In Philosophy of Mind, this is discussed in terms of different types of "supervenience" and whether the mind supervenes on the physical world in the same way as something like turbulence or digestion, or in a more limited sense where the physical world determines the content of experience but there's still more going on; and I think some say it doesn't supervene in any sense at all (but that probably just comes down to a disagreement about terminology). Physicalists say consciousness supervenes on physical processes in the exact same way as higher-order physical properties like turbulence, digestion, being alive, etc. Dualists feel that still leaves something out.