But if you're going to argue that qualia don't exist, then I'll have to believe that you're the one confused, not me -- the existence of qualia, the existence of my current subjective experience is the only thing I know for certain, more certain by far than I can of the existence of the physical world.

No, I am not saying that qualia are something well-construed which does not exist, like a tea pot orbiting Mars, or like an aquatic dinosaur living today in a lake in Scotland. I am saying that the concept of qualia critically misconstrues the evidence. In fact your own statement here nicely illustrates what I take to be the reason the concept of qualia exists and persists, which is that by its very conception it provides the philosopher with something that he is supremely confident in. To employ my example: the philosopher does not know whether he is looking at an apple, or a plastic fake, or whether he is a brain in a vat hooked up to a computer simulation of an apple. What can he do to escape his uncertainty which grows with each new possible scenario that he imagines? Why, in the end it turns out to be simple: he declares that all these possibilities which he is unable to tell apart share a common element, and that element is a common subjective experience. Thus he turns his own failure (to tell things apart) into a supposed success (the supposed discovery of a common element). Voila: qualia. The concept is in effect defined to minimize uncertainty. So for you to write:

the existence of my current subjective experience is the only thing I know for certain

strongly confirms my own view about the nature of the philosopher's concept of subjective experience, of qualia.

Some concepts refer to entities outside the mind, some to mental entities, and some don't refer. So the observation that something is "conceptual" tells us nothing, basically. The phrase "conceptual entities" seems empty to me. Did you mean something like "only and purely conceptual entities".

I don't think anyone here has ever argued that qualia can't be duplicated -- what we argue is that perhaps they can't be duplicated in a qualia simulator

And that argument is a basic MPF error, that you should be able to see through if you really understood "how an algorithm feels from the inside", or the rest of the mind projection fallacy sequence.

In order to claim that qualia can't be duplicated in a qualia simulator, you are claiming that a purely mental property exists, outside physical reality.

After all, if a simulated person behaves in exactly the same way as a non-simulated one, we have no evidence regarding the state of these hypothesized qualia, one way or another.

The untrained mind takes this to mean that there must be no qualia in the machine... and only the machine, instead of realizing that this just means there's no such thing in the first place. That we only think they exist because that's how the algorithm feels from the inside -- that is, the algorithm that our brain has for labeling things in the world as minds.

Our brains are built to suppose that things which move by themselves have minds and intentions. We can learn that things do not have minds, or that they do, but this labeling carries with it a host of specialized biases in our thinking.

And when you point this assembly of biases at something that is otherwise very simple, it's trivial to see that the question isn't, "can machines duplicate qualia?", because clearly, we are machines, so the question is silly.

It only seems like a question, because our brains have prebuilt categories for "animate" and "inanimate", and so the question feels like a big mystery to us... "how could something inanimate be made animate?"

So, the whole concept of qualia (as applied to this topic) is basically the human brain grasping at straws to preserve its inbuilt intuition that these are separate categories, instead of simply dropping them to realize that we are all made of the same stuff as machines are, and there's absolutely no evidence for the animate-inanimate distinction being anything other than an evolutionary convenience. It's not a "natural" category or distinction, outside the human mind.

In these discussions I've concerned myself only with improper use of the word "qualia" to support mystical arguments that attempt to place human consciousness > into a special category exempt from simulation or duplication.

The category of things whose simulations are not duplications isn't special or exceptional.It includes most things. Simulated planes don't fly, simulated gravity doesn't attract, etc, etc. There is a smaller category of things whose simulations are duplications. It is not an extraordinary claim to say consc. belongs in the first category. You need to examine the intutions that make you think it belongs in the second.

In order to claim that qualia can't be duplicated in a qualia simulator, you are claiming that a purely mental property exists, outside physical reality.

That doesn't follow, as explained above. That simulated gravity does not atrract, does not imply gravity is non-physical.

The untrained mind takes this to mean that there must be no qualia in the machine... and only the machine, instead of realizing that this just means there's no > such thing in the first place.

There clearly is such a things since I experience qualia every time I suck a lemon or sit on a brass tack. The "untrained mind" should have stuck with "we don't know one way or the other".

That we only think they exist because that's how the algorithm feels from the inside >-- that is, the algorithm that our brain has for labeling things in the world as minds.

If the algorithm feels like anything from the inside, there are qualia, because qualia are what something feels like. This is the error Searle is always pointing out:: you can't say conscious experience is just an illusion, because to be able to have illusions, you must be able to have experiences in the first place...

Our brains are built to suppose that things which move by themselves have minds > and intentions.

That has almost nothing to do with qualia.

And when you point this assembly of biases at something that is otherwise very simple, it's trivial to see that the question isn't, "can machines duplicate qualia?", because clearly, we are machines, so the question is silly.

In some senses of "machine" (eg artificial construct), we are clearly not machines. Absent a definition of "machine", that comment is almost meaningless.

So, the whole concept of qualia (as applied to this topic) is basically the human brain grasping at straws to preserve its inbuilt intuition that these are separate categories, instead of simply dropping them to realize that we are all made of the same stuff as machines are,

You mean quarks and electrons? Good luck building an electromagnet out of soap, then. We do have qualia,and they could depend on some vary specific physical and chemical properties, as does being a ferromagnet or a liquid crystal. That being the case, qualiaphilic arguments should not be lumped in with the supernatural, at least not without consideration of the specific argument.