Not sure why you think it is so strange that the sub-atomic world should be the cause of all our experience. An analogy can be made with the digital television screen, on which we view a life-like movie of colour and sound due entirely to the complex interaction of electrical impulses and binary digits.
Trevor

Trevor, I agree that this is an analogy we can readily understand.
We can explain to the blind man how a TV works (pixels are combined to make a continuous picture, a particular wavelength of light is captured to make a blue sky etc.), but does he not need to have experienced continuity and colour to know what they are in the first place; to know their meaning; what they refer to? This does not seem to me to be something that can be assertained from the physics.

I think you're right, Andrew. This is an argument from qualia. If you have two subjects and give both a complete explanation of the physical process of pain (c-fibers firing and so forth) and then give one an actual painful stimuli then the one who has the painful stimuli will clearly have more knowledge of pain than the one who knows all about the physics and biology involved.

I appreciate your comment Jonathan.
If we accept the existence of qualia, one problem we still have to grapple with is what this private knowledge of pain consists in and if it can really be described as 'knowledge' if we can be mistaken about it.
An example of the whipped prisoner comes to mind. The whip comes down on his back 49 times, and each time he feels excruciating pain. On the 50th stroke, a feather is used instead of a whip, but he feels exactly the same pain owing to anticipation. What sense can we give of him being mistaken about his private pain? How can we have knowledge of qualia if we can be mistaken about them?

It's not clear to me that the prisoner is or even could be mistaken about his pain. He may have a mistaken belief about what was used to cause the pain, but the experience itself isn't subject to error.

Jonathan,
I'm sure you are right that this experience or awareness of pain is fundamental to our understanding of it as a property. Only the prisoner himself can feel the pain, so it does not suffice to describe it in public, scientific terms (although the pain can certainly be described as being caused by the whip and the c-fibers). My worry is when we then conclude that pain is located in the mind as an isolated quality, which is what the notion of qualia implies. This 'dualist' position must be wrong. When we are in pain some 'thing' hurts, and there is a bodily location for our pain. Moreover, this awareness of pain is subject to error. We can attend to and assess the nature of our pain, while never being able to adequately describe it in words.