It probably helps that my background is in the sciences and I can speak the scientists' language.

Sense data are much more controversial than qualia, because they are associated with a controversial theory of perception - that one perceives the world by perceiving one's sense-data, or something like that.

Although I'm Australian, I find myself much more in sympathy with the Austrian version!

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.

It probably helps that my background is in the sciences and I can speak the scientists' language.

How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?

Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes.