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Kaj_Sotala comments on The raw-experience dogma: Dissolving the “qualia” problem - Less Wrong
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I suppose I'm using "materialism" in a slightly different way, then - to refer to a philosophy which claims that mental processes (but not necessarily qualia) are a subset of physical processes, and thus explainable by physics.
I don't know what you mean by "mental". By what concept of "mental processes" are qualia not mental?
I'm not even sure that I agree with this myself, and I realize that this is a bit of a circular definition, but let's try: mental processes are those which are actually physically occuring in the brain (while qualia seem to be something that's produced as a side-effect of the physical processes).
That's like redefining "sensation" to mean "afferent neural signal", which is what necessitated inventing the word "qualia" to stand for what "sensation" used to mean. That one's a lost cause, but to use "mental process" to mean "the physical counterpart of what we used to call a mental process but we don't have a word for any more" is just throwing a crowbar into the discourse. Maybe we need a term for "the physical counterpart of a mental process" to distinguish them from other physical processes, but "mental process" can't be it.