Two general but opposing points about qualia, again:
1. Contrary to the opinions of some, qualia are not phenomena from another, "mental" dimension -- they're not magical, not mystical, not ontologically distinct from the physical or natural world (however that's interpreted). But, even though they're the most familiar and immediate phenomena available to us, there is a puzzling and often frustrating aspect to qualia when they're brought into conjunction with our usual modes of scientific or rational explanation -- "blue" just doesn't seem to have anything at all in common with "a particular frequency of electromagnetic radiation", for example. And one reason for that, I think, is just that qualia are "primordial" -- they come before all concepts, and in fact before language itself -- whereas scientific explanation is a very sophisticated structure of abstract concepts that has been built *out of* qualia. Little wonder, then, that things get a bit knotted when we try to turn that sort of complex conceptual apparatus back on itself to "explain" the very phenomena that constitute its raw material.
2. But, that said, I also don't agree with others who might be thought of as the opposite extreme from the qualia mystics: the reducers or dismissers of qualia, who seem to hope that the puzzle and frustration they present to scientific or even philosophic explanation will go away if we just ignore them. At best, this side sees qualia as an inexplicable and apparently quite pointless side-effect of mental activity (the epiphenomenalists); at worst, this group might hope to dismiss the concept of qualia altogether as a kind of illusion or philosophical mistake (Dennett and co.). But I think that "qualia" -- in the sense of concrete, specific, qualitative conscious experience, as in tastes and feels, colors and sounds -- are quite real, even though they're quite distinct from chemical reactions, compression waves, and the like. I think that qualia are actual structures of neuronal activity, generated in one part of the apparatus of consciousness and received by another part that is specialized to apprehend these structures as primary, irreducible tokens. And far from being a pointless side-effect, these kinds of tokens are, first, logically necessary for consciousness itself, and, second, practically necessary for the sort of complex and autonomous behavioral control that a conscious control system provides.
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