David Bailey
Member
If you were to say that the vast majority of people in the atheist/secular/materialist/skeptical world don't believe in the afterlife, UFOs, ghosts or psi, then that would be a reasonable statement. What I object to is the idea that the vast majority of these people also agree about the nature of consciousness, free-will and moral values. These are philosophical questions, and let's face it, many people in the skeptical world think that philosophy is a waste of time and really don't know much about the subject. My suggestion is that if these people actually bothered to read some philosophy, and if they spent some time talking with Nagel, McGinn and Chalmers about these issues, then many of the them would agree with them about consciousness. There's still a lot of anti-philosophy feeling among skeptics, and a lot of ignorance.
You may be right, but if so, the fault is with the skeptics that don't read and understand what philosophers like Chalmers are saying!
Daniel Dennett gave a talk on this very subject:And by the way, every time someone says that materialists think that consciousness is an illusion, I know that they are being uncharitable and caricaturing people. How do I know this? Because no intelligent person would every say that consciousness is an illusion.
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness
More generally, I think skeptics tend to avoid agreeing about the special nature of qualia, or indeed about the value of philosophy in general, because they want to get rid of a very sharp and clear observation - that explaining qualia is a key issue with materialism - by fudging and blurring over the issue, or simply ignoring it. This is something that they do repeatedly, coming up with theories of consciousness that don't even address the issue:
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/CogSci/GWorkspace.html
David