Intrinsic properties qualia

We view qualia as intrinsic properties - as properties that things have independently of their relations to other things. Also, we are inclined to think that there is something metaphysically fundamental about qualia when qualia are not themselves simple and unanalyzable, we are inclined... 

As far as I can tell, there is only one theory of experience that provides a satisfactory way of dealing with this problem - representationalism. Rep-resentationalism maintains that our awareness of the characteristics we call qualia essentially involves representations and that the representations in question are different in a variety of respects from the representations that are involved in other forms of cognition. Because of the distinctive features of these representations, it maintains, the properties they represent seem to us to have special features, such as intrinsicness and simplicity, and seem to us to have individual natures that are not captured by scientific accounts of experience. Despite our impressions to the contrary, representationalism asserts, our awareness of qualia is governed by an appearance/reality... 

I think there are strong reasons for preferring representationalist accounts of awareness to accounts that are based on acquaintance. Thus, in the first place, representationalist accounts give us some hope of being able to account for the ways that objects of awareness appear to us. In particular, what is especially relevant to our concerns, they afford some hope of our being able to account for the ways that the properties that we call qualia appear to us. These properties seem to us to be intrinsic, seem to be simple (or at least to be analyzable into simple components), seem to support relations of qualitative similarity and qualitative difference, and so on. As noted earlier, representationalist theories of awareness have some promise of explaining why certain objects of awareness seem to us to have these characteristics. 

Too fast, 1 respond. How should we understand the term intrinsic in the premise here The term intrinsic sometimes means essential. Take the visual experience I am undergoing now, as 1 view the page before me. It is not implausible to hold that this experience could not have had a different phenomenal character. If I had been having a visual experience with a different phenomenal character, then it would not have been this very experience. If the phenomenal character of my experience is essential to it, then its phenomenal character is intrinsic to it in the preceding sense. If this is how we understand what it is for a property to be intrinsic, then the argument of the qualia internalist is straightforwardly invalid. 

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