Mindfulness or Mindlessness?

[Angrboda]

I get that it is a faculty of our organism to distinguish certain phenomena. The reason I brought color into the argument was to show the irreducibility of qualia.

It seems to me that positing qualia as a thing needing explanation inevitably leads to some version of the Cartesian theater. For good or ill, ontologies of mind seem to reflect naive folk theories more than anything which suggests that we haven't actually identified the phenomenon needing to be explained. Does the qualia need to be explained, or simply the phenomenon of thinking that I'm experiencing qualia? I'm reminded of dream consciousness in which impossible things seem to be real. Can we say anything beyond the brute Husserlian facts about what is and isn't a thing in a mind? Are beliefs a thing? What about memory -- are memories things? Most evidence suggests that memories are not things. But they're as "real" as qualia. So why give qualia a pass but not memories?