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In the beginning, we were creatures that simply experienced colors as a part of life. Our senses allowed us to interact with the work and that was just how it worked. As we advanced, we learned that colors are actually electromagnetic waves that enter our eyes, bounce around, hit some nerves, and send an electric signal to our brain, which then turns those pulses into color in our minds. But that process, the way your brain "creates" a color is both a scientific and philosophical question.
These sensations, found of course by your senses, are called qualia. When you look at a field of grass, the sensation of green is a qualia. When you eat ice cream, the taste of the ice cream is a qualia. When you look, smell, taste, feel, or hear anything, while in "reality" it may be electric pulses in your brain, you know that you experience something more than that. Through some process, your brain manages to take all the data it receives and turns it into the human experience. Every electromagnetic wave, chemical compound, and vibration of an atom is all dumbed down into qualia, into sensation.
However, perhaps qualia are not, in fact, a dumbing down of reality, but a beautiful expansion of it. Of course, the brain managed to evolve itself into this method of seeing the world because it allows us to succeed in life, but as far as we can tell, qualia are uniquely a conscious experience.
A relevant question in modern times is when we can say that AI is "conscious". Maybe, when it can make its own decisions or genuinely understand a human topic, rather than generating an answer based on human ones. However, all of these things a computer could just seem to do. If we make it really good at imitating human behavior, it may seem human, but it is not. You can see this in ChatGPT. In general, it talks nearly like a human, but we know that it's not. Maybe we could make a super advanced version of ChatGPT, almost perfectly replicating human responses, but it will be just that, replication. However, to make a truly conscious AI, it would need to somehow experience qualia. Sure, maybe it could act more human than a human could, but without qualia, it could never experience life as we do, and as such could never be conscious as we are.
Similarly, if you were to explain what the sensation of red was to someone who is blind, it would be essentially impossible. All emotions we feel from the color red (anger, power, aggression) stem from the fact that we already have experienced the color red. You couldn't say "a stronger orange" or "a less blue purple" as they've never experienced those, and even if they did know those colors, it would be difficult to imagine a new one. All of these qualia, red, the pain of stubbing a toe, the taste of bacon, and maybe even feelings of affection and love, are things that cannot intellectually be explained without reference to themselves.
This fact is an enigma among scientists and philosophers alike. For the scientist, if the brain is simply tissue and electricity, how could it possibly be generating experience? We understand how the information is received by our body and then sent to our brain, but what neuron, what electrical pulse, could possibly generate within us an experience? For the philosopher, it is a similar conundrum. As in AI, consciousness raises many questions about our own existence. How are we conscious, and why? Likewise, how do we experience qualia, and why? It seems that qualia are an essential part of our consciousness, yet both the part and the whole remain a mystery.
The simplicity of the question and the complete lack of a definitive answer is almost ironic when compared to the rest of our achievements. Not only have we gotten to the point of understanding that qualia are not the "true" nature of our world, but we understand elementary particles, the curvature of spacetime, and many minute details about our universe, yet we cannot explain how we manage to see blue. We've somehow become matter aware of its own composition and existence, but we can't get far enough to see how.
However, we should consider that maybe asking the question is eliminating the possibility of an answer. Asking the question of how we experience qualia is inherently asking for some sort of scientific explanation, and even if you could get some formula for how your mind mechanically creates qualia, from our perspective, qualia are not mechanical. Almost every scientific question we've asked is about some sort of mechanical process. How waves form, why the stars twinkle, why the sun sets, every question is about some mechanic of the universe, and the question of qualia and of consciousness is asking how matter could know that it is matter. Perhaps like every other biological process, consciousness is inherently mechanical, and our uniqueness actually stems from the delusion that we are unique, but would we ever be satisfied with an answer like that?
Maybe, one day, we will be. Despite that, just like how we still simply eat for joy rather than to understand exactly why it tastes that way, I would urge you to appreciate the gift of qualia regardless of the intellectual debate or reasoning behind it. As I said, we've asked the question of how waves form, why the stars twinkle, and why the sun sets, but even with that knowledge it is important to simply appreciate the beach, the night sky, the sunsets, and even the color red for the experience, and for the qualia.