If I knew I would have already written an AI.

I think this is confusing qualia with intelligence. There's no big confusion about how an algorithm run on hardware can produce something we identify as intelligence -- there's a big confusion about such an algorithm "feeling things from the inside".

Well, if you already do not accept those concepts, you need to tell me what your basic ontology is so we can agree on definitions.

It seems to me that in a physical universe, the concept of "algorithms" is merely an abstract representation in our minds of groupings of physical happenings, and therefore algorithms are no more ontologically fundamental than the category of "fruits" or "dinosaurs".

Now starting with a mathematical ontology instead, like Tegmark IV's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, it's physical particles that are concrete representations of algorithms instead (very simple algorithms in the case of particles). In that ontology, where algorithms are ontologically fundamental and physical particles aren't, you can perhaps clearly define qualia as the inputs of the much-more-complex algorithms which are our minds...

That's sort-of the way that I would go about dissolving the issue of qualia if I could. But in a universe which is fundamentally physical it doesn't get dissolved by positing "algorithms" because algorithms aren't fundamentally physical...