> Should we start by stating that "qualia" or "consciousness" or whatever is a placeholder name for "whatever dark (unknown, black-box) mechanism explains the observable phenomenon named as such", then we might have a chance at actually forming a coherent theory thereof. IMHO.

Perhaps, although in the case of qualia I’m not sure what the phenomenon is that we need a placeholder explanation for. For dark matter we’ve got certain observations of galaxies. For qualia we’ve got, what? A lot of people who feel very strongly that they are unable to deny the existence of something that they cannot describe beyond that claim of undeniable existence? If that’s how astrophysicists explained dark matter I’d be inclined to think that maybe it just doesn’t exist.

Edit: thanks to autocomplete we were briefly embroiled in an argument about the existence of quails.