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> but there is also the direct experience of choosing. Whatever free will is, it has to do with this experience of bringing a cause into the universe essential ex nihilo, from within yourself.

Is this sort of what is meant with 'qualia'? I could never quite wrap my head around what that concept means, in what context, and what its value is.

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Yes I think that's more or less it. You can describe the entire mechanism of how an eye, optic nerve, and brain system sees the color green. In an ideal world you could explain that mechanism in absolutely detail, down to the molecule, down to the particle. Yet even if you did you would have said nothing about the most important thing about seeing the color green, which is the actual experience of doing so. That experience is what they call qualia. You can have the experience without actually seeing anything—you can dream it or imagine it, for example—which suggests that the experiencing is more fundamental, maybe more "real" in some sense, than the mechanism. Yet modern people, particularly of a scientific bent, have a dangerous tendency to emphasize the mechanism over the experience, even to the extent of denying the experience, and with it, the "person" part of people.

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