[missingrib]

You have first-person knowledge of qualia. I'm not really sure how you could deny that without claiming that qualia doesn't exist. You're claiming some middle ground here that I think almost all philosophers and neuroscientists would reject (on both sides).

> "couldn't something be H2O without being water?," "what if the universe was created last Thursday with false memories?," or "what if only I'm real?" These are dead-end questions. Like 14-year-old-stoner philosophy: "what if your red is ackshuallly my blue?!"

These are all legitimate philosophical problems, Kripke definitively solved the first one in the 1970s in Naming and Necessity. You should try to be more humble about subjects which you clearly haven't read enough about. Read the Mary's room argument.

[A_D_E_P_T]

> You have first-person knowledge of qualia. I’m not sure how you could deny that...

I don't deny that. I explicitly rely on it. You must have misunderstood... My claim is not:

1) "There are no qualia"

2) "Qualia are an illusion / do not exist"

My claim is: First-person acquaintance does not license treating qualia as ontologically detachable from the physical/functional. I reject the idea that experience is a free-floating metaphysical remainder that can be subtracted while everything else stays fixed. At root it's simply a necessary form of internally presented, salience-weighted feedback.

> This middle ground would be rejected by almost all philosophers and neuroscientists

I admit that it would be rejected by dualists and epiphenomenalists, but that's hardly "almost all."

As for Mary and her room: As you know, the thought experiment is about epistemology. At most it shows that knowing all third-person facts doesn’t give you first-person acquaintance. It is of little relevance, and as a "refutation" of physicalism it's very poor.