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The argument breaks down for me here:

> because the experience of wet is wholly subjective.

I can't distinguish this from "wetness is a quale." In which case the analogy water : wetness :: brain : qualia reduces to water : qualia :: brain : qualia.

Also:

> the experience of having experiences

The fact that we sometimes slip up and use recursive language like this is a suggestive sign to me. We intuit that experience is somehow "already present," or fundamental, as idealism claims. If idealism is true, then you _are_ consciousness, and already know it at some level.

> the experience of having experiences

this is not recursive, really. It is not written to imply that experience is universal, in fact quite the opposite. Most of us generally posit that rocks do not have experiences. Most of us posit that humans do, and likewise (famously) so do bats. But what the experiences that a bat has? It's not unreasonable to assume that they are quite different from the ones a human has.

Ergo, we cannot really compare the experiences of a bat with those of a human. But we can note that they both have experiences, and that is the magical part. I was just being flowery by using "experience" twice in a row, but in another sense I was trying to differentiate between the questions of "why are our experiences as they are?" and "why do we have any experience at all?" This is something that I think Dennett in particular fails spectacularly at (and he agreed with me, once :)

As for the "wetness is a qualia" point, yes, that is good summary of my point, but I am sorry, I do not understand the notation you are using after that.

Sorry, didn't realize it's not standard notation. In English:

"Water is to wetness as brains are to qualia" reduces to "water is to qualia as brains are to qualia."

I agree that people have experiences, but I don't understand why they must be magical or non-existent in the physical world. Why can't the word "experience" simply be referring to the physical processes that happen when our mind/body is in some particular environment?

Certainly physically ingesting a small amount of certain psychedelic chemicals can have profound effects on subjective experience, so it can't be too disconnected from physical processes.

The whole issue of qualia / experiences seems like it is an extension of the dualist/materialist perspectives rather than something that sheds light on it one way or another - dualists will view qualia as something non-material and so something that materialism can't explain, and materialists will view qualia as something material along with consciousness itself.

I say this in all sincerity: thank you for providing a much better example of the kind of hand-waving flim-flam I was referring to than I was able to.

I imagine that you are making some kind of point here, but this is just exactly what loses me every time. Is that some kind of mental deficiency on my part? I suppose it could be, but if it is then I don't think it's one I want to correct.

This sounds like you might be able to gain something from the “Do chairs exist?” video by vsauce.[1] Basically, he goes through the different philosophical reasonings of the past and then explores where each one of those fall apart. He goes explicitly into how small things can create something larger but why philosophers have struggled to make the leaps to change definition. He ends on the latest philosophical reasoning, which I think thoroughly explains your conundrum.

I’ll try to explain even if it seems less profound here than in the video. Basically, all concepts are emergent behavior of “stuff.” There really isn’t a chair, but “stuff” arranged chair-wise. And humans decide what that boundary is for both chairs and consciousness as they are concepts we apply to stuff that is “chairing” or “being conscious.” A collection of neurons may or may not be conscious by defining how they behave. And the details on where we draw the line for consciousness is no different than where we draw the line for how many atoms we can scrape away from a chair and it still be a chair.

[1] https://youtu.be/fXW-QjBsruE

Maybe you experience qualia, but I’m just a configuration of matter. I can’t know what it’s like to experience qualia, because I don’t experience them. Instead, my configurations change according to input and internal processes. I am purely phenomenological.

No worries. You're not part of the discussion, then.

Who is included in the discussion? Is there anyone we can agree has subjective experiences which are not phenomenological?

We can agree that anyone who reports having no subjective experience is not a part of the discussion, i think.

That’s a profoundly unsatisfying answer. I really am interested in who you consider to be a part of the discussion. If qualia are not phenomena, how can we talk about them besides in the hypothetical, since conversations are phenomena? If someone claims to not experience qualia, why would you take that claim any more or less seriously than the claim that someone does experience qualia, or the claim that qualia exist at all?

…or is it possible that qualia are phenomenological?