One would not predict the existence of intrinisically subjective qualities in an entirely physcial, and therefor entirely objective, universe.

Disagree.

Let's look at the actual observations. I see red, It has some atomic "redness" that is different from the atomic "blueness" of blue and the atomic pleasure of orgasm and the atomic feeling of cold. Each of these atomic "qualia" are subjectively irreducible. There are not smaller parts that my subjective experience of "red" is made up of.

Is this roughly the qualia problem? That's my understanding of it.

Here's a simple computer program that reports on whether or not it has atomic subjective experience:

qualia = {"red", "blue", "cold", "pleasure"}
memory_associations = {red = {"anger", "hot"}, blue = {"cold", "calm"},
pleasure = {"hot", "good"}}
function experience_qualia(input)
for _, q in ipairs(qualia) do
if input == q then
print("my experience of", input, "is the same as", q)
else
print(q, "and", input, "feel different")
end
end
print("furthermore, the feeling of", input, "seems connected to")
print(table.concat(memory_associations[input], " and "))
print("I have no way of reducing these experiences, therefore I exist outside physics")
end
experience_qualia"red"
experience_qualia"blue"

From the inside, the program experiences no mechanisms of reduction of these atomic qualia, but from the outside, we can see that they are strings, made up of bytes, and compared by hash value. While I don't know the details of the neurosceince of qualia, I expect the findings to be roughly similar. Something will be an irreducible symbol with various associations and uniqueness from within the system, but outside, we will be able to see "oh look, redness is this particular pattern of neurons firing".

EDIT: LW killed my program formatting. It should still run (lua, by the way)