I was not implying qualia were magic, insofar as there can be monistic descriptions of qualia. My criticism was that the example appeared to be steering the co

I was not implying qualia were magic, insofar as there can be monistic descriptions of qualia. My criticism was that the example appeared to be steering the conversation into a crash course with dualism by invoking qualia-like explanations of compositionality when it was unnecessary to do so. I believe the "hard problem" is far easier than the dualists' interface problem. It can be explained by viewing consciousness not as the driving force behind our thoughts/feelings, but rather an after-the-fact log the brain keeps for itself. Qualia are therefore distinct from the immediate physics of signals reaching the brain; they are instead the brain's own shorthand description of the impact those signals had on the brain. Compositionality isn't a categorical stumbling block because the machines are actually getting incrementally better at it. The Winoground paper the article references explicitly says that score on their compositionality benchmark does in fact scale with training dataset size, suggesting that while it is more difficult for AI to discover compositionality during training, there is no reason to think it is impossible