What I'm trying to tease out is isn't an opinion alone. It's a generally understood problem in the scientific community. I'm highlighting it to illustrate the issues at hand.

> So you end up either needing to draw a line somewhere between mechanical computation and qualia computation, or you can relegate it to supernatural (a soul) or grey areas (quantum magic).

Quite literally the jury is still out. It is a hotly debated topic approached from various angles. Arguments are nuanced which is why you fill find ideas such as panpsychism thrown into the mix. I hate appealing to authority but in this instance it is more than warranted. Humans have grappled with this for centuries and the problem hasn't gone away.

Please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

I think there are several lines. Phase changes happen relatively suddenly, when a system or subsystem reaches a critical threshold. The experience of "qualia" certainly involves many such phase changes as a complex, dynamical system grows in complexity while maintaining stability.

A sufficiently complex organism lacking eyes but having light-sensitive organs still experiences qualia if you define it the right way. But do they experience heartbreak like I do? It isn't an all-or-nothing situation, even if we don't yet know where these lines are.

This supports the idea that subjective consciousness emerges from complexity in systems that have sensory feedback loops. The simpler the system, the smaller the qualia space.