Funny how those highly unlikely borderline cases whisk away a lot of the confusion, huh? No committed physicalist can postulate a serious difference between seeing something red and having a virtual red-thing pumped into your optic nerve, I would hope. I think that’s a far more useful scenario than thinking about someone suddenly be able to see colour. In fact, you could probably keep moving a step towards your magical ‘inner perceiver’ and asking whether ‘it’s a real experience of redness’. That’s not to say that qualia are fundamentally dualistic, simply that it’s idle to discuss that question while we clearly don’t have the capacity to get anywhere near it at this point.

I’m always surprised to see people arguing for or against the existence of ‘qualia’ or similar as though they’re making some sort of contribution to the field. Particularly when it’s such nonsense as ‘if brain science doesn’t come up with an explanation for these thingies, it’s not complete!’