"Qualia" is a meaningless term made up so that philosophers can keep publishing meaningless papers. It's completely unfalsifiable: there is no test you can even theoretically run to determine the existence or nonexistence of qualia. There's never a reason to concern yourself with it.
The term has some validity as a word for what I take to be the inner perception of processes within the brain. The qualia of a scent, for example, can be taken to refer to the inner processing of scent perception giving rise to a secondary perception of that processing (or other side effects of that processing, like evoking associated memories). I strongly suspect that that’s what’s actually going on when people talk about how it feels like to see red, and the like.
The test I use to determine that there exist qualia is “looking”. Now, whether there is a test I can do to confirm that there is any that anything(/anyone) other than me experiences, is another question. (I don’t see how there could be such a test, but perhaps I just don’t see it.)
So, probably not really falsifiable in the sense you are considering, yeah.
I don’t think that makes it meaningless, nor a worthless idea. It probably makes it not a scientific idea?
If you care about subjective experiences, it seems to make sense that you would then concern oneself with subjective experiences.
For the great lookup table Blockhead, whose memory banks take up a galaxy’s worth of space, storing a lookup table of responses for any possible partial conversation history with it, should we value not “hurting its feelings”? If not, why not? It responds just like how a person in an online one-on-one chat would.
Is “Is this [points at something] a moral patient?” a question amenable to scientific study? It doesn’t seem like it to me. How would you falsify answers of “yes” or “no”? But, I refuse to reject the question as “meaningless”.
You can't be serious. Whatever one wishes to say about the framing, you cannot deny conscious experience. Materialism painted itself into this corner through its bad assumptions. Pretending it hasn't produced this problem for itself, that it doesn't exist, is just plain silly.
Time to show some intellectual integrity and revisit those assumptions.
