Unless you are a professional philosopher, you may never have to use those technical terms for the fundamental distinction of Reality (quanta) and Ideality (qualia). But if you intend to post on this forum for amateur philosophers, you will often need to make that crucial discrimination between Things and Ideas-About-Things.
I can't back off on brain only information being the best model... and communication becomes a simple process of encoding and decoding physical matter. — Mark Nyquist
If you are a professional scientist, the physical brain is indeed the best subject for study. But if you are a layman, it will be useful to be able to distinguish between Physical Matter and a Meta-physical Process. The process we call "Thinking" does not take place in space, but in time. That's why it is not subject to empirical testing, but only to theoretical modeling. Your "brain only" view is missing half the picture.
I'm still not sure if you think information should be both brain internal and brain external? — Mark Nyquist
Let me clear-up that uncertainty. I do think that Information is both physical (brains) and meta-physical (minds). It's common nowadays for philosophers to claim that there is no such thing as a Mind. They justify that view by labeling the Conscious Contents of your brain as "illusions". If that is the case, then everything you think you know, including your model of the world, is an illusion. But the question arises : who is deluding who? Are you constructing a fake world in your brain? If that mental model has no relevance to reality, what good is it? And if the other posters on this forum are likewise deluded by their private illusions, what's the point of communicating with them?
Speaking of communicating, your "brain only" model implies that communication of Information would have to send a little chunk of your brain (the material machine) to the brain of the receiver. But physicist Paul Davies refers to the immaterial contents of your brain as "the demon in the machine" (the Mind or Soul). http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page6.html
Now that I have introduced that taboo term "Soul" into the conversation, let me quote from a book by astrophysicist John Barrow, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. In a chapter on Life and the Final State of the Universe, he says : ".. . an intelligent being -- or more generally, any living creature -- is fundamentally a type of computer [an information processor] . . ." Then, ".. . we may even say that a human being is a program designed to run on particular hardware called a human body . . . the essence of a human being is not the body but the program which controls the body; we might even identify the program which controls the body with the religious notion of a soul". So, the distinction between Qualia and Quanta is equivalent to the ability to discriminate between a Computer and its Program. The machine (quanta ; hardware) without a program (qualia ; software) is a "brick". Likewise, a Brain without a Mind is a Philosophical Zombie. Is your Brain running a Program, or are you a Zombie? :joke:
Zombies in philosophy are imaginary creatures designed to illuminate problems about consciousness and its relation to the physical world. Unlike the ones in films or witchcraft, they are exactly like us in all physical respects but without conscious experiences: by definition there is ‘nothing it is like’ to be a zombie. Yet zombies behave just like us, and some even spend a lot of time discussing consciousness.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/
Both/And Principle :
My coinage for the holistic principle of Complementarity, as illustrated in the Yin/Yang symbol. Opposing or contrasting concepts are always part of a greater whole. Conflicts between parts can be reconciled or harmonized by putting them into the context of a whole system.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
Note : in order to avoid the obsolete religious connotations of "Soul", I prefer to refer to the human Program as the "Self" or "Self Concept".