ML: And of course, behind the qualia there are physical things going on. And in a sense the concept of a quale is something that arises in an attempt to make sense of this to ourselves. But nevertheless this is fiction.

SJ: But what you're getting at is that these quale are actually palpable.
ML: I like that word
SJ: they have some existence beyond just being some sort of thing that is named (or is a name).
ML: In a sense they are the very essence of physical being. At any rate they are a manifestation of the essence of physical being, if that doesn't sound too portentous or pretentious. In a sense, what we're grasping in qualia is the very stuff of physical reality, the inner, how should I put it... as it were, the oomph.

SJ: Really your view is more that qualia are the substrate or the base; or that they're the differentiated versions of the base?

ML: Well, they're what flesh out the structure. What we're finding in qualia, what we're sensing is that what we're aware of in being aware of qualia is, in a fragmentary way as I say, is a manifestation of what it is that has the structure. That's the simplest way, the least metaphorical way of putting it. I think that that's literally true.

But then of course, a number of other questions arise. One question is well, alright (and this is what Wilfred Sellars calls the "grain" problem) the trouble is that if it's true that the qualia are actually that which has the physical structure, the kind of physical essence, then how come the structure, the phenomenological structure of consciousness, doesn't seem to match up with the physical structure of our brains as that would be given by the physical sciences. So, there's that problem.

SJ: In what way does it not match up?

ML: Well, that's the point when I quoted Carl Sagan, when the character in his novel says, "think about what consciousness is like, think about what it's like this moment. Does it feel like billions of atoms wizzing about?"

SJ: No, its more like some kind of unified entity, which is where your unity thing comes from isn't it?

ML: Well yes.That goes back to one of the challenges that is presented for a materialist, and that is, as I said earlier, the unity of consciousness. So, as I say, I think the grain problem has to be taken very seriously and I think so does the unity problem. And as it happens I think that quantum mechanics is capable of resolving in principle both the unity problem and the grain problem.

The way in which commonsense conceptualises physical reality, I think, is deeply mistaken. It has tremendous pragmatic value, but if you take quantum mechanics seriously as a universal theory then our commonsense view is way off target.

One thing that both quantum mechanics and relativity interestingly have in common is that they say (there are no unique ways of describing reality). You see, I think that question is so nicely crystallised by Carl Sagan, it seems to me there's something that's implicit there. The implication is that there is one, as I put it, canonical way of describing reality. You know, it's like God's story about what's happening. And I think the assumption is: well, God's story is going to involve things like atoms and so on, crucially. So, because we assume rightly that our physics is on the right track, we think that God's story about what's happening will get down to the one true story about reality.

SJ: That's the mind of god?
ML: Well, exactly that's right, that's God's story. Now I think that the message that comes out, both of relativity and of quantum mechanics, is that this very idea that there is a God's story, a uniquely canonical way of describing reality is itself an idea that is effectively discarded. Now if you discard that idea, you can't say well look, here's what I imagine God's story would be like, but, hell, the story that your introspective awareness seems to be delivering ain't at all like that, you know. Therefore you can't match the two.

Now, I think there's no God's story. Both relativity and quantum mechanics basically say there's an infinity of different stories, which are all equally good.