Why Intentional Properties Aren't Intrinsic
I agree that it sounds fairly plausible to say that phenomenal states have a kind of representational content built into them. But I don't find that plausible anymore if it's combined with the assumption that being of phenomenal type Q is an intrinsic and essential property of phenomenal states. Here's an intuition pump.
Consider a world just like ours except that flying-pigs qualia have traded places with crooked-image qualia. That is, in this world, people have the kind of phenomenal experience we have when we look at flying pigs when they look at crooked images, and vice versa. But our duplicates at this world are not halluzinating flying pigs when looking at crooked images. No, they are not at all mislead by their experiences. For instance, they are not at all inclined to say that there are flying pigs, or that they are seeing flying pigs in these cases. Nor do they draw any of the inferences we would draw if we had the impression of seeing flying pigs. Instead, they typically infer that they are looking at a crooked image. And they would judge their experience to be veridical just in case there really is an image hanging crooked before them.
If qualia are intrinsic and essentially linked to their representational content, this scenario is possible. But isn't there something crazy about it? In what sense do the flying-pigs qualia of our duplicates represent flying pigs? The only sense I can see is that they do so in virtue of representing flying pigs in our world. But that's like saying that "gift" means "poison" in English because it means "poison" in German. This seems to be a very extraordinary conception of meaning.
Note that our duplicates are also totally mistaken about what their perceptual experiences represent. They look at a crooked image and take their experience to represent a crooked image (at least that's how they describe it, and that's what explains the inferences they draw, the moves they make and the tests they accept as confirming and disconfirming the experience), but alas, in fact it represents a flying pig. If that makes sense shouldn't we worry whether in reality we are the duplicates and they have things right? Perhaps our crooked-image qualia represent flying pigs rather than crooked images?
Here you're assuming that if there's a sort of representational content that supervenes on phenomenology (call this sort of content phenomenal content), then if one experience represents that something is phi (e.g. is a flying pig), a phenomenally identical experience will represent that something is phi. But the latter doesn't follow from the former. The former says that some content supervenes on phenomenology, not that all content supervenes on phenomenology.
If all phenomenal content were Russellian content (object- or property-involving content) and vice versa, the conclusion might follow. My own view is that phenomenal content isn't Russellian content but Fregean content (invoving modes of presentation of objects and property, and analyzable in terms of e.g primary intensions). This view doesn't have any problem with the case above: it's handled by noting that the same mode of presentation can pick out different properties in different centered worlds. See "The Representational Character of Experience".