Saying "our understanding of the world is incomplete because it has no explanation for qualia" is a classic, fallacious god of the gaps argument.
In fact we do have the beginnings of viable neuroscientific theories of consciousness, including qualia [1], thus showing that the claims of a hard problem were just the same old smoke and mirrors we've seen time and time again in claims to human specialness, just like with vitalism.
> and you are saying that our understanding of the world implies that magic doesn’t exist and so I must be mistaken about the magic of my legs and probably their existence as well.
Nah, our only disagreement is over the magic. I don't deny the perceptions of qualia, simply their special, "ineffable", "experiential" character that you implicitly conclude they must have. That's the magic that doesn't fit into our body of knowledge and that's the only "hard problem" of consciousness, a problem that doesn't really exist because it's based on erroneous assumptions, as described in the paper above.
Just like placing a pencil in a glass of water gives the illusion that the water has broken the pencil, so your introspective perceptions trick you into erroneous conclusions about your awareness.
But what exactly is the erroneous conclusion here? It clearly exists widely and many people report having it. We don’t know how it works or its mechanism. We have no idea how to create more of it outside of having babies. We have no idea if animals have it. A recently dismissed Google employee was unable to prove to himself that a chatbot didn’t have it. A physical explanation would require completely new science as science has almost no existing concept of the phenomenon.
> But what exactly is the erroneous conclusion here? [...] A physical explanation would require completely new science as science has almost no existing concept of the phenomenon.
That is the erroneous conclusion. "Qualia", whatever they are, fits squarely into physicalism and there exists literally no evidence that anything more is required. The paper I linked is proof that qualia can be accounted for within science as it exists. Again, you're asserting a god of the gaps.
> It clearly exists widely and many people report having it.
That doesn't mean that water actually breaks pencils. The meaning of any observation is always interpreted within a consistent body of knowledge. The problem is that people really want to take the perception of their experience as a direct observation of reality that doesn't need to go through that interpretation step, and that's simply incorrect.
In fact we do have the beginnings of viable neuroscientific theories of consciousness, including qualia [1], thus showing that the claims of a hard problem were just the same old smoke and mirrors we've seen time and time again in claims to human specialness, just like with vitalism.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119
> and you are saying that our understanding of the world implies that magic doesn’t exist and so I must be mistaken about the magic of my legs and probably their existence as well.
Nah, our only disagreement is over the magic. I don't deny the perceptions of qualia, simply their special, "ineffable", "experiential" character that you implicitly conclude they must have. That's the magic that doesn't fit into our body of knowledge and that's the only "hard problem" of consciousness, a problem that doesn't really exist because it's based on erroneous assumptions, as described in the paper above.
Just like placing a pencil in a glass of water gives the illusion that the water has broken the pencil, so your introspective perceptions trick you into erroneous conclusions about your awareness.