Qualia are internal variables but they are taken from different realm

Consider a simple example: E = mc². The law describes a relation between mass and energy, but notice that "E" isn't a physical object. It's a letter of the Latin alphabet, as are the other symbols in the equation. The Latin alphabet emerged at a particular moment in human history and reflects the features of human language (which decomposes into roughly thirty sounds), as well as the physical conditions of writing. Different alphabets evolved alongside different instruments and surfaces: cuneiform, for instance, was shaped by the practice of pressing a stick into wet clay.If an alien were handed a book of mathematical equations, it could learn a surprising amount about human language and the materiality of human writing. The letters play a functional role inside the equations, but they're imported from somewhere else entirely.In this post I want to suggest that qualia work the same way: they are objects from a different realm, conscripted by the human mind to serve as internal variables.The "internal variable" part is the easier half. The feeling of red is needed to designate red objects in the world. We can't use red itself for that – red is just a wave frequency, and the brain has no way to process a frequency directly. In the same way, we can't use energy itself as the symbol for energy in Einstein's equation. We need to borrow from another realm, one that contains objects fit to serve as symbols. Mathematics borrows from written language.What I'm suggesting is that qualia are borrowed objects too. This doesn't dissolve the hard problem - we still don't know what the realm of qualia actually is - but we can develop some intuitions about its properties by pushing the comparison with letters as far as it will go.What the analogy gets us1. The inverted spectrum is fine. If colorblindness involved a complete and consistent recoding of qualia, the system would still work – just as E = mc² remains functionally identical if we rewrite it as L = ub².2. The set is finite