(Reply to Galen Strawson)
GS: “If you identify the notion of experiential qualitative character with that of feeling, then we agree on the facts, and disagree only on the terminology.“
Then we agree on the facts and just disagree on the terminology!
(I find it much more straightforward and natural to speak about what experiences feel like than to speak of their “qualitative character” — but absolutely nothing substantive rides on this taste in terms.)
GS: “the hard problem rests essentially on a false assumption…that we know something about the nature of the physical that gives us a good reason to think that there is a problem in the idea that the experiential is physical“
My hard problem is not that metaphysical one, but this epistemic one: We cannot explain how and why we feel rather than just do (or, if you wish, why and how we have “experiences with qualitative character” rather than just do).
If I may translate into my preferred terms the paragraph you quote from Strawson (1994) (p. 196):
*Each sensory experience is felt, and each thought experience is felt. We have, so far, no explanation of how the eye and brain give rise to feeling. In the same way, we have no explanation of how the systems of the brain that generate thought give rise to feeling. The fact remains that we feel.*
I agree that we have no explanation “so far.”
(I also give some reasons in my paper why I don’t think we ever will. Among other things, I think your own preferred “panpsychism” pays far, far too exorbitant an ontic price for very little in the way of an explanatory purchase. It hypothesizes, without evidence, that feeling is a ubiquitous latent feature of matter all over the universe — which, amongst other things, creates a bit of a mereological nightmare — leaving it just as much of a mystery how and why we feel rather than just do. It borrows the bottom-line — the-buck-stops-here — character of the fundamental forces [electromagnetic, gravitation, strong subatomic, weak subatomic], but without their massive supporting evidence or explanatory power.)