I would posit that in this case, the computer experiences qualia. My strong suspicion is that awareness is substrate-independent: it doesn’t matter whether th underlying stuff is wires or goo.
Answer to the OP: nobody knows, because we can’t ask them. Furthermore, nobody knows whether anyone else experiences qualia, we just have to take them at their word.
Seriously, I go with Chronos’s explanation. But that begs the question of whether animals actually have any sort of consciousness that is “aware” of the qualia. (I take that question to be somewhat meaningless, though.)
The interesting thing is that we can discuss the properties of qualia. For example, humans have 4 optical sensors: red, green, blue, and (mostly) achromatic. Those sensory inputs could be processed in a number of different ways leading to a number of different qualia categories. In fact the color receptors are wired in such a way that we end up with the categories of primitive colors we perceive. Regardless of the mixture of wavelengths, nobody honestly reports “bluish yellow” or “reddish green”.
So, we have no idea whether my mental image of “red” matches yours. But we know a lot about the relationships between my “red” and yours (even if you have any one of a number of types of color blindness).
Some pigeons, on the other hand, have 5 different color receptors. Analyzing the low-level neural processing, we could come up with a “color chart” that would reflect the different categories that pigeons perceive, and could possibly come up with statements like the above about which colors seem to blend and which ones don’t seem to.
So, we could talk about properties of the qualia. Does this mean they actually “have” qualia? IMHO, the question doesn’t make sense, but that’s from the standpoint of my belief that awareness is an emergent property of information processing.
