I think the contemporary notion of qualia is helpful insight into the insufficiency of scientism. But that does not mean that its advocates have conceptualized it very well. Something to study more. Meanwhile, I note that Daniel Dennett, true blue reductionist that he is, argues that the notion of qualia is incoherent. The premise in this argument is the list of properties of properties that he kindly offers his reader: ineffable, subjective, intrinsic and private. By setting his argument this way at the beginning, he may be offering a straw man. I dunno: I haven't really surveyed what everyone out there thinks qualia are like. But in any case, later on in the argument on this topic that I listened to in Intuition Pumps, he seems to argue in a very clearly circular manner. I need to find where he does that and transcribe it here ... maybe later this week.
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
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