CCC, you're absolutely right to highlight the diversity of human experience. But this diversity doesn't mean there aren't qualia universals.

It doesn't mean that there aren't, but it also doesn't mean that there are. It does mean that there are qualia that aren't universal, which implies the possibility that there may be no universals; but, you are correct, it does not prove that possibility.

There may well be qualia universals. If I had to guess, I'd say that I don't think there are, but I could be wrong.

Thus there isn't an unusual class of people who relish being waterboarded. No one enjoys uncontrollable panic.

That doesn't mean that everyone's uncontrolled-panic qualia are all the same, it just means that everyone's uncontrolled-panic qualia are all unwelcome. If given a sadistic choice between waterboarding and uncontrolled panic, in full knowledge of what the result will feel like, and all else being equal, some people may choose the panic while others may prefer the waterboarding.

Apologies if I wasn't clear in my example above. I wasn't imagining that pure paperclippiness was pleasurable, but rather what would be the effects of grafting together two hypothetical orthogonal axes of (dis)value in the same unitary subject of experience

If you feel that you have to explain that, then I conclude that I wasn't clear in my response to your example. I was questioning the scaling of the axes in Clippy's utility function; if Clippy values paperclipping a million times more strongly than it values pleasure, then the pleasure/pain axis is unlikely to affect Clippy's behaviour much, if at all.

However, I'm not at all sure that I've got any kind of conceptual handle on what "clippiness" might be. So I don't know if the thought-experiment works.

I think it works as a thought-experiment, as long as one keeps in mind that the hybridised result is no longer a pure paperclipper.

Consider the hypothetical situation that Hybrid-Clippy finds that it derives pleasure from painting; an activity neutral on the paperclippiness scale. Consider further the possibility that making paperclips is neutral on the pleasure-pain scale. In suce a case, Hybrid-Clippy may choose to either paint or make paperclips; depending on which scale it values more.

The phenomenal binding problem? The best treatment IMO is still Revonsuo: http://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/body_and_health/Neurology/Binding.pdf No one knows how the mind/brain solves the phenomenal binding problem and generates unitary experiential objects and the fleeting synchronic unity of the self.

So - the question is basically how the mind attaches input from different senses to a single conceptual object?

I can't tell you how the mechanism works, but I can tell you that the mechanism can be spoofed. That's what a ventriloquist does, after all. And a human can watch a film on TV, yet have the sound come out of a set of speakers on the other end of the room, and still bind the sound of an actor's voice with that same actor on the screen.

Studying in what ways the binding mechanism can be spoofed would, I expect, produce an algorithm that roughly describes how the mechanism works. Of course, if it's still a massive big problem after being looked at so thoroughly, then I expect that I'm probably missing some subtlety here...