If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)

[Angrboda]

A more blunt observation could have been made, though-- if you shoot someone through the brain, they will no longer experience qualia.

Except that in this case the painter did continue to experience qualia, just certain components of that qualia were missing. So that wouldn't be a fair observation at all. It's reminiscent of when I challenged ChadWooters argument about veridicality of experience with the example of blindness anosognosia. His response was that you can't tell much from broken brains. This is precisely wrong. You can tell a great deal about ordinary consciousness from broken brains. In this case, part of the brain is missing, and correspondingly, part of the qualia is missing. The brain damage revealed how tightly connected to brain function the experience of qualia is.

That being said, the philosophical question of capacity isn't really about the link between brain and specific qualia. It's why ANY physical structure, under any circumstance, would experience qualia. Why does anything in the universe have this capacity for the existence of subjective experience, rather than just grinding through its mechanical processes sans esprit?

That's not so much a philosophical question as a biological and evolutionary question. Why does the brain produce qualia? Because it evolved that capacity. We can ask similar questions about why we evolved bipedalism, or language, or opposable thumbs. The answers, while interesting in and of themselves, don't reveal a need of an Ur substance for each of these things, language doesn't have to be distributed throughout the universe in order to explain language in the human brain, and there are plenty of animal models to draw upon to suggest that language just evolved. How language or consciousness work is indeed an unsolved question, but we don't need to appeal to explanations that lie outside the brain for the answer. Parts of brains contribute parts of consciousness; the whole of the brain contributes the whole of consciousness. There is no need to appeal anywhere else.