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orthonormal comments on Nature: Red, in Truth and Qualia - Less Wrong
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After reading the first post in this sequence, I had the idea that a quale is like a handle to a kernel object in programming. Subconscious brain corresponds to the OS kernel, and conscious brain corresponds to user-space. When you see red, you get a handle to a "redness" object, which you can perform certain queries and operations on, such as "does this make me feel hot or cold", or "how similar is this color to this other color" but you can't directly access the underlying data structure. Nor can the conscious brain cause the redness object to be serialized into a description that can be deserialized in another brain to recreate the object. Nor can Mary instantiate a redness object in her brain by studying neuroscience.
Orthonormal, does this model also capture what you're saying, or does the "graph" model offer different insights?
I'm ashamed to admit this, but I haven't worked with programming on a deep enough level to be comfortable with your analogy. The one thing I think it's missing (and I haven't done a very good job explaining this) is the process of learning/introspection and the distinction between "adding to a body of propositional knowledge" and "triggering the 'learning' subroutine in the mind", which causes the central confusion.
Propositional knowledge and introspection may be analogous to running a virtual machine in user-space, in which you can instantiate the redness object. But that's not a redness object in the real (non-virtual) program. The "real" running program only has user-space objects that are required for the execution of the virtual machine (virtual registers, command objects, etc).