I can't think of any specific examples off the top of my head, but almost every episode you will talk about the dominant paradigm or world view today, and you will usually describe this in terms of biological robots in a meaningless universe where consciousness is an illusion. I'm arguing that this is not the dominant paradigm and that in fact hardly anyone believes it.
I agree with you that if Psi and the afterlife are real, then all versions of materialism are falsified, so in that sense it doesn't really matter whether the dominant paradigm today is emergentist or eliminativist materialism.
But in another sense it does matter. Saying that the dominant paradigm sees the world as devoid of love, feeling, value and meaning is much more negative and much nastier than saying that the dominant paradigm is simply false.
Plus, of course, some of us want to know what atheists and materialists actually believe and why they believe it. Throwing out these caricatures and stereotypes all the time just gets in the way of that.
Yeah, you have a point I suppose. Maybe most materialists want to believe that morality matters, but only for as long as one is alive. Sam Harris seems to be in this camp. Somehow, morality emerged along with consciousness as a result of Darwinian evolution, and we try to behave as well as we can.
Possessing morality would in that circumstance be equivalent to, say, possessing two arms and legs, a digestive and nervous system, and so on. There are some people who are less moral than others, and we have set up laws and punishments to deal with them for the sake of the rest. Human society works for the majority of people alive at any given instant, and over time, things gradually improve.
The internal feelings and impressions we have seem real enough, but where did they come from? For most materialists, qualia are just a fact of life: we might not be able to explain them, but they exist and we behave in accord with them. At some future time we
might be able to explain how they are generated and why we can't seem to do without them, but for the moment, they're a mystery.
Personally, I find that very hard to accept. Darwinian evolution doesn't explain why we couldn't exist as now, but without the experience of qualia. Why do we have such a strong impression of an interior life? Why
couldn't we have evolved, in fact, as zombies who feel nothing? If we had, then I don't suppose we'd be here having this discussion. We'd just be aggregations of molecules behaving as we behave, and there'd be no internal voice that seems to be saying, hang on a moment...
Whatever materialists in the large think, one needs to square what that internal voice is saying with the fact that we don't behave that way. They have to explain to themselves how that could be, and at root, that's the source of the argument. In the end, I don't think they seriously engage with the question. For us non-materialists, be we mere believers or people of claimed experience, it's the only question worth engaging with. Who am I? What am I doing here? We can't help it. The question gnaws at us incessantly, and hasn't yet been answered.
