I suspect I cannot really help you with your question. Also, I only dabbled in introduction to formal philosophy as side-projects to my CS education. Mostly I a

I suspect I cannot really help you with your question. Also, I only dabbled in introduction to formal philosophy as side-projects to my CS education. Mostly I am self-taught, having spontaneously performed several of the text-book thought experiments on my own, as a child. Apologies if my nomenclature is not quite right for you. I also have a somewhat anti-authoritarian disposition. I tend to adopt or kidnap ideas I encounter without any urge to toe the line of their respective schools of thought. Yes, I was referencing that being a bat problem. However, what I meant to emphasize was the spectrum of creatures. Most people grant inner lives to familiar animals even though we cannot claim to comprehend them directly. But, many people have incoherent beliefs as they work further down the ladder towards plants, colonies, and other simple life. Their need to find a boundary where the spark occurs is closeted dualism, in my opinion. I consider a quest for qualia to be essentially dualism in disguise, and endless debates about the term itself to be proxy war on just how to beg the question. When I was lectured by Searle and his views on being a bat and his chinese room, I felt he was begging the question and playing to the peanut gallery. He wants you to assume there is "understanding" that a room lacks. He doesn't want you to dwell on the difference between the room and the system comprised of the room, the rules, the translation state, and the executive functions literally embodied by attendants. I enjoyed a contemporaneous course from Lakoff to consider his metaphorical mappings and category thinking as a counterpoint. We all liked to joke that it might be metaphors all the way down. My reading of these topics may have begun my own gradual turn towards reductionism and behaviorism. I do not think qualia deserve any special place compared to any other abstraction. I don't think there is anything more real about the sense of first-person experience than there is about a sense of justice or love in a particular human interaction. I think that these are all in the same category of perceptual abstraction. I think ALL abstractions admit or even encourage an ontological failure mode which is to impose discrete symbols over fuzzy realities, and tempt logical deductions over this willful ignorance. This is why I frequently return to topics like identity, memory, and mental pathology which illustrates such failings. I question the "you", the "moment", and the "ride" as all being convenient but potentially misleading abstractions. Finally, I think that the qualitative experience you seek to explain is tied up in the mind-body problem and has as much to do with introspection of the body and hormonal systems as it does introspection of cognition. I took interest in Rodney Brooks and his subsumption as a possible explanatory mechanism here. To keep insisting that you can discuss the quality of experience independently of the content is, again, a signal of latent dualism to me.