I must have done a bad job explaining it, because I don't think it's a cop-out at all, and I would have hoped that even you would have agreed with that much, ev

I must have done a bad job explaining it, because I don't think it's a cop-out at all, and I would have hoped that even you would have agreed with that much, even if you disagreed with me in the end. A cop-out would be blithely insisting qualia don't exist (like some people in this thread are doing), or insisting that one or another philosophical explanation is forbidden "by definition." And in my opinion, saying it's "emergent" would be a cop-out because often "emergence" just serves to label a phenomena without explaining it. By contrast, saying that qualia are nakedly physical is to say that they are something, and to say that we are witnessing raw physical events in a direct way is to at least aspire (successfully, I would hope) to give some tangible account of what it is for a mind to have qualia in a way that respects the first person perspective. That could be wrong or confused or unpersuasive in any number of ways. But it's at least something more than a cop-out. There is more to it than that, and I'm happy to give my best shot at taking that starting point, and applying some philosophical duct-tape to those starting pieces to try to show what it would mean to say qualia are literally physical, and what kind of explanation gives them their due as "real" while still tying them to the physical world. But that may be a long conversation, and I am humble enough to know I won't be able to settle one of the oldest philosophical issues in a hacker news thread. So I would like to at least point to literature that drives my intuitions on the subject. Consciousness Explained, by Daniel Dennett, to at least pump the intuition that we should not merely regard a physicalist account of conscious as a legitimate answer to the hard problem, but as the leading candidate for explanation, maybe even the only game in town. Caveat being that he does insist that we should deny qualia altogether in the end, which I think is a cop-out. But he brings the ball to the 1 yard line. Godel Escher Bach & I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, to drive home that a key aspect of consciousness is the ability for a system (be it a brain or computer) to interpret the medium that it itself is a part of. Hofstadter I think has the idea that brings it into the end zone, but wouldn't be able to get to the 1-yard line by himself. "The Intertwining—The Chiasm" by Maurice-Merleau Ponty, who gives a powerful argument that turns the tables against the subject/object distinction. Killer quote: "What is this talisman of color, this singular virtue of the visible that makes it, held at the end of the gaze, nonetheless much more than a correlative of my vision, such that it imposes my vision upon me as a continuation of its own sovereign existence?" I didn't get to everything, but I wanted to put enough on the table to make this a satisfactory end point to the conversation if need be.