Comment by jasonjmcghee

The smell of coffee is not the molecules in the air; the molecules in the air cause you to smell something, but the smelling itself is a subjective experience. The same for the signals in our brain; that's an objective explanation of the cause of our experience, but the subjective experience in itself doesn't seem to be able to be broken down into other things. It's prior to all other things we can know.

You’re right that the experience of the smell of coffee is associated with a bunch of different molecules entering our nose and stimulating receptors there. These receptors then cause an electrochemical cascade of salts into the brain producing neural patterns which are associated with the experience of the smell of coffee. But this is all just association. The conscious experience of the smell of coffee, or red for that matter, is different than the associated electrochemical cascades in the brain. They’re very highly correlated but very importantly: these electrochemical cascades are just associated with qualia but are not qualia themselves. Only qualia is qualia, only red is red, though red, the smell of coffee, etc are very tightly correlated with brain processes. That’s the distinction between consciousness and the brain.

The smell of coffee (and your other examples) are not a property of the molecules themselves. It is the interpretation of such molecules given by our brain and the “coffee-ness” is a quality made up by the brain.

Yes, in our experience we associate perceptions and also concepts to other concepts and words. But that doesn't explain 'qualia', the fact of having a conscious experience. The AIs also associate and classify. Associating does not explain qualia. Why would? The association happens, but we have 'an experience' of it happening.