But if it's an absolute quality, it shouldn't depend on the arrangement or state of brain matter at all. The mass of a group of atoms is an absolute quality that doesn't change depending on how you move them about. Yet our experience of consciousness depends totally and critically in highly testable ways on the arrangement of atoms in our neurons. There doesn't seem to be much absolute about it at all. Even tiny changes can eliminate it completely. I just find it very hard to credit the absolute quality proposition, yet I don't see how dualism can avoid it.

So yes materialist answers to this question still have a lot of explaining to do, but dualism can't have a free ride either. It certainly doesn't seem to me to be simpler. At least in the physicalist explanation we can point to other epiphenomena and compare them to consciousness in broad ways. But what known, explicable, testable phenomena can we compare dualism to? It stands apart from all of science.