One and a half answers - reality.   
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Reader beware! While most of the material on this site deals with leading or at least, recognised theories, this is where I get to tell you straight out what I personally think.

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The appeal of the doctrine of qualia (and it is considerable) stems from the powerful intuitive sense we have that something is missing from our accounts of, say, seeing a distant light.  The physical business of light striking our retina and the brain responding is all very well, but however good our account of the physics and the biology, they never explain what it is like to see the light. It seems perfectly possible to imagine all those physical processes could happen, and I could come to know that there was a light over there, without my ever actually seeing the light – perhaps rather in the way that blindsight seems to work.

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There is, of course, something missing from our theories about sight and other senses, but it is not a further bit of explanation or some additional data – it is simply the reality of actually seeing a light. Even the most comprehensive theoretical account of light does not, itself, contain real light, and when we put it like that it’s obvious that we shouldn’t expect it to. Knowing what something is like is not, in fact, a matter of knowing anything in the sense of having some information about it; it is a matter of having, or remembering, a real experience.

Why don’t people see, or accept this point? I think there is a group of wrong but very prevalent ideas which obscure the truth in this area.

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One is the theory, widely accepted within philosophy for a long time, according to which we don’t see real objects, we see sense-data about objects. This theory was based on consideration of illusions. If we saw a mirage in the desert, there was no real oasis, so we couldn’t be seeing one: yet we seemed to be seeing something. It must be a mental image of an oasis, or something of that kind, that we were actually seeing. Since illusions and reality could be indistinguishable, it seemed to follow naturally that even when there was an oasis, it was really only the sense-data we perceived directly. The theory was undoubtedly made more plausible by our understanding of the physiology of vision, which told us there were a number of data-processing steps between us and the perceived object. First light reaches our eye: it is focused on the retina; it evokes a response in the rods and cones within the retina; it becomes a set of neural impulses; it travels to the back of the brain along a set of neural pathways and then… at some stage it impinges on our consciousness. Surely by the time the signal got to that point, we were dealing merely with data; ergo, data was all we ever really perceived. 

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Of course, this is entirely wrong. In the case of illusions, the mistake does not come between us and the thing perceived (if any); it comes afterwards, in our interpretation of what we are perceiving. We don’t correctly perceive mistaken data about an oasis, we mistakenly believe we see an oasis. When we see a real thing, we see the thing: the physiological story about eyes and nerves is simply about how we do it.  

Nevertheless, the sense-data perspective exerts a powerful influence. If data are all we experience, and we have all the data about a colour or sensation, what could possibly be missing?  

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A second common mistake is to assume, consciously or not, that information is all there is to reality. We tend to think of Nature enforcing laws and doing the calculations to decide how objects should move and interact. In doing so, we fall into the trap of confusing the maths and the theories we use to describe reality, with an underlying principle which generates reality. There is no such principle, of course, only real things themselves. Knowledge may in some sense be power, but to have all possible knowledge about something is not actually to have the thing itself.

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This is easier to see in certain cases than in others. No-one imagines a cricket ball is actually doing sums as it flies along in order to determine its own path.  But when it comes to astronomy, the feeling that maths is somehow in control becomes overwhelming: the relevant calculations must, we feel, in some sense, perhaps only implicitly, be going on somewhere, perhaps in a Platonic second world. We start imagining that to understand cosmic maths is to ‘know the mind of God’. But of course, maths and theories are purely descriptive and purely human. God would no more need maths to understand the world than he would need a telescope. Reality is not constituted by data, but again, if we think it is, and we have all the data about redness, how come we don't experience redness?

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Which leads on to a third issue – what does constitute reality? If real things don’t consist of data, what do they consist of? What is it that caused them to exist, and be the way they are? Here we touch on the final important element in the mistaken mystery of qualia. Among the deepest and hardest questions of philosophy or science are ‘why is there anything’ and ‘given that there’s something, why this?’.  These questions are particularly hard to deal with because it isn’t at all clear what kind of answer there could possibly be. However, if we could reduce the world to formulae, there might be more of a chance. Philosophers and scientists have all, I suspect, at some stage in their life nurtured a secret dream of finding the theorem, the proof, the calculation, which explains everything: which makes it possible to calculate the nature of the world from nothing, and hence, implicitly, to show that the world was impelled into existence and shaped into the incomprehensibly complex patterns it assumes today, by logical, mathematical necessity. In philosophy this unacknowledged project took a severe, perhaps fatal blow with the failure of Frege’s project to reduce maths to logic. If maths can’t be boiled down to pure logic, there’s no point in even thinking about physics. But in physics itself the dream lives on. We rightly expect calculation to explain reality to the extent that explanation means 'illuminating description'; and we slip easily into the unreasonable expectation that calculation can be the explanation of reality in the sense of having caused it. 

So there is, at the end of the day, a mystery here. But it isn’t the mystery of qualia, which are just real experiences. It’s the mystery of reality itself.

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