I notice that this qualia business has me terribly confused, and wonder if it is worth reading all of the literature that everyone smarter than me is referencing while discussing it.

Are we treating mental experience as something special, and not just awareness? I don't really get why the talk of experiencing color comes up so much (I did read about Mary's room after reading another LW discussion on the subject).

If it helps, I notice sighted people tend to treat blindness as seeing complete darkness. I know that, for my particular condition at least, this seems to be a horribly inaccurate prediction, but it helps that I started out with one eye nonfunctional. I suppose someone who went from perfect vision to completely blind over night might wake up perceiving darkness (though I'd expect it to be a little more complicated? Let's just assume they were knocked out and had their eyes removed while unconscious.).

What I do experience, though, isn't easily described, what with how the language is set up. All this really makes me think with regards to mental experience is that either I'm the main character of reality (considering how much is out there and how little contact there is between I and the rest of the world, this seems unlikely, but I suppose it could be a universe in which a complicated background is necessary to mention but not interact with, somehow...), or that mental experience is how we describe being able to observe our own cognitive processes, in our crude built-in way.