Yeah, I definitely like IIT and think its on to something important. But it doesn't strike me as a sufficient condition for consciousness. I have a lot of sympathy for GWT. One of its theoretical virtues is that it coheres with theoretical properties of consciousness with independent justification like integrated information, recurrence, self-modelling, etc. But it still lacks any direct theory of phenomenology, i.e. qualia. Although I can see why scientists would avoid attempting such arguments if at all possible. This would be a good place for philosophers to bridge the gap, but I guess it is easier to make a career out of promoting panpsychism these days than to come up with something insightful to say about mechanistic consciousness.
But to move the discussion forward, I think one obvious property of qualia is that it is representational. That is to say, it is structurally related to the thing being indicated such that it can inform about the thing. For example, the red quale tells you something about red substances in the context of the space of possible colors, the external world full of beneficial and harmful substances, and the bearer of the quale with drives, dispositions, preferred states, etc. This complex millieu of properties, states, dispositions, etc, all serve to inform the properties of a quale. Its representational power is one that gives the bearer certain competencies in the actual world, e.g. pain gives one the competency to avoid damaging states. But this representational power must be intrinsic to the structure that constitutes a quale. If this were not the case, then its power to confer competency would be contextual. Pain would only confer competency in the right environment (like a reflex that has meaning only in the right environment, e.g. the grasping reflex of an infant). But this isn't the case with qualia; the experience of pain is intrinsically representative and provides its bearer with competence universally. The same can be said for emotions and our senses. This suggests to me that some kind of recurrent structure is a necessary condition for a quale: to simultaneously be the producer and the consumer of a representative state, and consume in such a way that necessarily confers competent behavior. But this discussion sounds like a different level of description of coordination between different subsystems. Information from different subsystems bear on this central coordinator, and this information confers competent behavior on downstream subsystems, i.e. contextually relevant causal powers. I see the beginnings of the details required for mechanistic qualia in theories like GWT and others based on principled analysis of brain networks.
But to move the discussion forward, I think one obvious property of qualia is that it is representational. That is to say, it is structurally related to the thing being indicated such that it can inform about the thing. For example, the red quale tells you something about red substances in the context of the space of possible colors, the external world full of beneficial and harmful substances, and the bearer of the quale with drives, dispositions, preferred states, etc. This complex millieu of properties, states, dispositions, etc, all serve to inform the properties of a quale. Its representational power is one that gives the bearer certain competencies in the actual world, e.g. pain gives one the competency to avoid damaging states. But this representational power must be intrinsic to the structure that constitutes a quale. If this were not the case, then its power to confer competency would be contextual. Pain would only confer competency in the right environment (like a reflex that has meaning only in the right environment, e.g. the grasping reflex of an infant). But this isn't the case with qualia; the experience of pain is intrinsically representative and provides its bearer with competence universally. The same can be said for emotions and our senses. This suggests to me that some kind of recurrent structure is a necessary condition for a quale: to simultaneously be the producer and the consumer of a representative state, and consume in such a way that necessarily confers competent behavior. But this discussion sounds like a different level of description of coordination between different subsystems. Information from different subsystems bear on this central coordinator, and this information confers competent behavior on downstream subsystems, i.e. contextually relevant causal powers. I see the beginnings of the details required for mechanistic qualia in theories like GWT and others based on principled analysis of brain networks.