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Quite simply, qualia is a subjective experience. Subjectivity in this case should be understood in such a way that qualia are not reducible to objective parameters. For example, looking at the same red object (the physical characteristics of which are constant), different people will experience at least a little, but different “redness”. This difference, which is not limited to physical parameters, is qualia.
A classic illustration of the concept of qualia is the Mary's Room thought experiment. Its meaning is this: imagine Mary, who is a talented scientist studying color and its perception. For some incredible reason, Mary lives in a black-and-white room, reading black-and-white books and watching a black-and-white monitor. It has access to all the scientific information in the world, say, through a computer network. Thus, she knows everything about color both from the point of view of neurophysiology and from the point of view of physics. However, if she goes outside one day and sees the world of color, then she will learn something fundamentally new about color, which is not limited to her physical and biological knowledge. This is basically qualia.
Thus, another formulation of the concept of qualia is that qualia refer to “what it feels like”, for example, ” how does it feel to see the color red?”.