You keep making statements like,

the neuron firing pattern is presumably the cause of the quale, it's certainly not the quale itself.

And you seem to consider this self-evident. Well, it seemed self-evident to me that Martha's physical reaction would 'be' a quale. So where do we go from there?

(Suppose your neurons reacted all the time the way they do now when you see orange light, except that they couldn't connect it to anything else - no similarities, no differences, no links of any kind. Would you see anything?)

I don't understand what else is there.

and why not?

So if you disagree that qualia is a basic fact of physics, what do you think it reduces to?

Something brains do, obviously. One way or another.

And if you think physics can tell whether something is a Turing-machine-simulating-a-brain, what's the physical algorithm for looking at a series of physical particles and deciding whether it's executing a particular computation or not?

I should perhaps be asking what evidence Searle has for thinking he knows things like what qualia is, or what a computation is. My statements were both negative: it is not clear that qualia is a basic fact of physics; it is not obvious that you can't describe computation in physical terms. Searle just makes these assumptions.

If you must have an answer, how about this: a physical system P is a computation of a value V if adding as premises the initial and final states of P and a transition function describing the physics of P shortens a formal proof that V = whatever.

Suppose that neuroscientists some day show that the quale of seeing red matches a certain brain structure or a neuron firing pattern or a neuro-chemical process in all humans. Would you then say that the quale of red has been reduced?

Do you think you can reduce qualia?

Well, would that mean writing a series like this?

My intuition certainly says that Martha has a feeling of ineffable learning. Do you at least agree that this proves the unreliability of our intuitions here?

I do think essentially the same argument goes through for free will

Could you expand on this point, please? It generally agreed* that "free will vs determinism" is a dilemma that we dissolved long ago. I can't see what else you could mean by this, so ...

[*EDIT: here, that is]

if you simulate a brain with a Turing machine, it won't have qualia (because: qualia is clearly a basic fact of physics and there's no way just using physics to tell whether something is a Turing-machine-simulating-a-brain or not)

There's your problem. Why the hell should we assume that "qualia is clearly a basic fact of physics "?

I can't really speak for LW as a whole, but I'd guess that among the people here who don't believe¹ "qualia doesn't exist", 1 and 2 are fine, but we have issues with 3, as expanded below. Relatedly, there seems be some confusion between the "boring AI" proposition, that you can make computers do reasoning, and Searle's "strong AI" thing he's trying to refute, which says that AIs running on computers would have both consciousness and some magical "intentionality". "Strong AI" shouldn't actually concern us, except in talking about EMs or trying to make our FAI non-conscious.

3. if you simulate a brain with a Turing machine, it won't have qualia

Pretty much disagree.

qualia is clearly a basic fact of physics

Really disagree.

and there's no way just using physics to tell whether something is a Turing-machine-simulating-a-brain or not

And this seems really unlikely.

¹ I qualify my statement like this because there is a long-standing confusion over the use of the word "qualia" as described in my parenthetical here.

Searle says his life's work is to explain how things like "money" and "human rights" can exist in "a world consisting entirely of physical particles in fields of force";

Someone should tell him this has already been done: dissolving that kind of confusion is literally part of LessWrong 101, i.e. the Mind Projection Fallacy. Money and human rights and so forth are properties of minds modeling particles, not properties of the particles themselves.

That this is still his (or any other philosopher's) life's work is kind of sad, actually.