Science

I'm definitely partial to the idea that qualia is an emergent property, but I also think that it's a continuous gradient as opposed to a binary property. I suspect that some level of self awareness arises in any organism that interacts with its environment in a volitional way. At a fundamental level it's the organism modelling itself in its environment. Being able to move towards food and away from danger are two basic requirements, and creating an internal model that integrates sensory inputs and reacts to them is a good solution to this problem. And we observe this in pretty much all living organisms. Then it's just a matter of how complex this model becomes.

Simple organisms have a very rudimentary model, but complex ones exhibit increasing levels of fidelity. There is also a possibility that qualia is just an exhaust fume from this process. It's entirely possible that the functional survival of the organism does not necessitate consciousness, but it is an emergent property that necessarily falls out from the need of the organism to model itself within the environment. Consciousness can be sort of an echo resulting from that process.

I definitely agree that this is one of the most interesting problems in nature. It's fascinating that it's something so core to our experience, yet we're unable to define what it is exactly.