Qualia—the ineffable, qualitative properties of conscious experience—are often dismissed as unscientific and irrelevant to psychology. This paper argues that some complex human behavior cannot be explained without accepting qualia as traditionally understood. In art research, aesthetic properties are acknowledged to depend partly on their resistance to structural analysis, and the same logic applies to sensory qualia. There is no sharp boundary between simple qualia and complex artistic properties. Both should be accepted as legitimate objects of special sciences, perhaps reducible in an idealized sense but indispensable in certain explanatory contexts.
The hard problem of consciousness, often considered unsolvable by empirical science, can be addressed through a structuralist framework in neuroscience. Qualia, or qualitative properties of experience, are argued to be compositional with internal structures that determine their nature, and these structures can be identified with specific neural patterns. Consciousness is understood as a complex neural pattern that misperceives some of its own structural properties as monadic and qualitative. This approach analyzes consciousness in fully structural terms, thereby claiming to solve the hard problem.