So you end up either needing to draw a line somewhere between mechanical computation and qualia computation, or you can relegate it to supernatural (a soul) or grey areas (quantum magic).
> So you end up either needing to draw a line somewhere between mechanical computation and qualia computation, or you can relegate it to supernatural (a soul) or grey areas (quantum magic).
Quite literally the jury is still out. It is a hotly debated topic approached from various angles. Arguments are nuanced which is why you fill find ideas such as panpsychism thrown into the mix. I hate appealing to authority but in this instance it is more than warranted. Humans have grappled with this for centuries and the problem hasn't gone away.
Please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
The hard problem of consciousness doesn't support either of those statements, and instead illustrates why they can't confidently be made.
So it's confusing because you seem to recognize that qualia cannot currently be measured, while also making a statement measuring qualia.
Similarly, qualia is ill-defined, but we can't even start talking about it or refining it until we've at least given it a label and drawn a large circle on the map showing where it might be. Criticisms extending past that must also consider that "life" and "intelligence" are just as ill-defined, and that throwing all of those definitions out leaves us with very little to talk about or probe.
A "neutrino" isn't a name given to something initially to try to define it later. The neutrino started as an experimental result. There was missing spin in some particle interactions. Stuff came out with a different angular momentum than what went in, and this was easily reproducible and clearly a real effect. But it didn't make sense, as it was a violation of a core conservation law that held everywhere else in the universe that we could observe.
So theorists (Wolfgang Pauli, specifically) sat down to try to describe what kind of thing would be needed. And then, and only then, did it get a name. And it turned out the theory predicted other stuff, like the neutrino carrying momentum and energy in a certain way, and interacting through only the weak force and not electromagnatism or the strong force, and later experiments confirmed that this was basically the way it worked. Later still it was shown that the mass is actually non-zero but extremely small, etc...
So sure: "neutrino" is a well-deserved label[2] for an abstraction we should understand and study. But it got its name after we started studying it, not before!
Philosophers want us to just drop and genuflect to this "qualia" notion long before[1] it's actually shown to be useful for describing anything at all.
[1] Infinitely, possibly. The fact that it predicts nothing testable is pretty good evidence IMHO that it doesn't actually exist at all, at least in the form philosophers want to talk about. Their failure to present any analysis of AI systems based it stands to that point too.
[2] Coined by Fermi, actually, not Pauli. Hilariously the neutrino was originally called "neutron" and its discovery predates the understanding of the structure of the atomic nucleus!
I literally said nothing about "how" we discovered it, I said, "We don't know what's inside a neutrino, and it's really hard to experiment with them, but we kind of know why and how they interact with different things."
It is wild how you would take that and my analogy about drawing a circle on a map with respect to qualia to mean that I said anything which contradicts the history of neutrino research.
I'm going to assume this was just a true misinterpretation and not just another straw man, so with that in mind, do you have a different response?
I'll appeal to authority in that scientists and philosophers today in all of the worlds universities and those in the past have determined to understand this phenomenon. That it exists is a given, what it is, is more murky. Again it's not me saying this.
And thus we have this sprawling discussion. :)
A sufficiently complex organism lacking eyes but having light-sensitive organs still experiences qualia if you define it the right way. But do they experience heartbreak like I do? It isn't an all-or-nothing situation, even if we don't yet know where these lines are.
This supports the idea that subjective consciousness emerges from complexity in systems that have sensory feedback loops. The simpler the system, the smaller the qualia space.