This is a tricky area, because it’s a gap in our knowledge. As a species we are largely ignorant of how exactly the brain works, it’s easy to fill in that blank with speculation
So while we could in PRINCIPLE explain qualia as a consequence of matter… it’s still not definitive that’s what’s happening in our brains.
If you can’t imagine how one might generate something akin to qualia, perhaps this thought experiment might help. Imagine a computer monitor that’s being perceived by a camera. Let’s say this camera is hooked up to an AI that plays chess but obviously does so visually, in fact it only does so visually. It can only play chess by observing and recognize the pieces and their positions as displayed on the monitor. It has to “appear” a certain way for this AI to recognize the game let alone play.
Now without changing anything about how this AI works, we can hook the input that determines what is shown on the monitor directly into the output of the camera…
We no longer need a screen nor camera… yet the AI can still play chess.
The visual perception it requires in order to recognize the game must be present, but it is rendered imperceptible to the rest of the world. All we see is the hardware clicking and clacking away, but clearly the AI is seeing a 2 dimensional image of a chess board, otherwise it couldn’t play chess.
In such a case would that perception not be a form of qualia?
If you spend a moment and consider the implications you would have to conclude that the AI is no longer sensing EM radiation but is still receiving the visuals of chess… we could add audio to it’s perception without actually vibrating the air. We now have a way to make it sense things that do not exist for anyone or anything else. It is merely interpreting electrical signals and turning them into “perception” at this point. We could make it see anything… hear anything… in fact we could categorize the signals however we like, we do not have to emulate the physical world at all. We could create sensations of novel things that are neither light, sound, taste nor anything else… we could call such things emotions… and none of it would appear as “electrical signals” to the AI… it would appear as chess or anything else we decide.