Nickhere said, Many academics feel uncomfortable with qualitative experience because it can't be subjected to empirical sciences. There's simply very few ways to number crunch or pie-chart qualitative experience in the way you can with 'facts and figures'.

This is fairly central. If it is qualitative, how do you communicate that quality, which is an internal feeling in your own brain, to someone else, who may have a completely different feeling from the same stimulus? The old schoolboy problem asks how you know that the colour you see as blue doesn't look to someone else as what looks like, say, orange to you? But all can agree that the colour is the same, whatever it looks like subjectively, if it appears at a particular position on a rainbow created from a white light using a prism.

The problem with subjective qualities is that unless you can confirm them with someone else, you can't be sure that they are real. Unless you have something by which you measure the quality, you can't be sure you are comparing the same thing- then if you have a measure, it is no longer qualititive!

It is this business of distinguishing the real from the non- real that is central to the debate. Humans are dab hands at fooling themselves, wishful thinking is instinctive, and it takes real discipline to avoid it.