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The aspect of consciousness consisting of 'raw feels' or the felt qualities of experience. It is significant in the debate over consciousness as it relates to the challenge of explaining subjective experience in terms of objective brain processes.

The examination or observation of one's own mental and emotional processes. Introspection is central to discussions about qualia, as it suggests that there are aspects of consciousness that are accessible only from the first-person perspective, thus posing a challenge to reductive physical explanations of the mind.

The view in philosophy of mind that all facts about consciousness and mental states can be explained entirely by physical facts about the brain and body. The debate over the adequacy of physicalism is invigorated by the concept of qualia, which some argue cannot be accounted for by purely physical explanations.

A theory in the philosophy of mind that argues for the fundamental distinction between the mental and the physical—suggesting that mental phenomena (like qualia) cannot be fully explained by physical processes. It is significant in the debate over consciousness as it poses a major challenge to physicalist accounts that attempt to explain everything about the mind in terms of brain activity.

A philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson featuring 'Mary the color scientist' who knows everything about color but has never experienced it. When she sees red for the first time, she learns something new—what it's like to see red—suggesting that qualia are not captured by physical explanations alone.

The subjective, first-person qualities of conscious experience, such as the redness of red or the pain of a headache. Qualia are central in the debate over whether or not consciousness can be fully explained by physical processes, as they highlight the 'hard problem of consciousness'—the difficulty of explaining why and how we have qualitative experiences.

The term refers to the difficulty that physicalist theories of the mind have in explaining how brain processes result in subjective experiences of qualia. The gap signifies the chasm between the objective, scientific description of the brain and the subjective quality of experience.

Coined by philosopher David Chalmers, it refers to the problem of explaining why we have qualitative experiences at all, and how they could arise from physical processes in the brain. The 'hard problem' illuminates the difficulty in understanding how matter can generate subjective experience (qualia) and why it feels the way it does.

The hypothetical scenario where someone's experience of colors is systematically different from the norm (e.g., their 'red' looks like another person's 'green') but their behavior remains the same. It is significant because it challenges the idea that physical states determine conscious experience, suggesting that two people could react the same way while having different subjective experiences.