Not interested. First of all, "qualia" is a slippery, ill-defined term. Secondly, I'm not here to beat up on atheists.
Though it is true that many/most atheists of my acquaintance are metaphysical naturalists — who insist that everything in nature has a physico-chemical basis and explanation, and that all causation in nature is local and "efficient" in the Aristotelian sense — not all atheists are satisfied with such presuppositions.
Case in point: the self-described atheist Thomas Nagle, whose book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False [Oxford University Press, 2012], acknowledges the following:
With regard to the origin of life ... the option of natural selection is not available. And the coming into existence of the genetic code — an arbitrary mapping of nucleotide sequences into amino acids, together with mechanisms that can read the code and carry out its instructions — seems particularly resistant to being revealed as probable given physical law alone.Then we get back to those squishy (ill-defined) qualia. As mentioned earlier, I have never yet come across a precise definition of this term. But it is clear to me that the term refers to subjective mental and emotional states which exist beyond the ability of the scientific method to test. Therefore, since they are immune from scientific direct observation and test, they must in some way be "unreal." And so are to be regarded as "epiphenomena of brain activity," and, as such, have zero capability of "causing" anything to happen in the real world.
In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture from a very different direction: the attack on Darwinism mounted in recent years from a religious perspective [sic] by the defenders of intelligent design. Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer are motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs, the empirical arguments they offer against the likelihood that the origin of life and its evolutionary history can be fully explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves. Another skeptic, David Berlinski, has brought out these problems vividly without reference to the design inference. Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair.
But the fact of the matter is these "subjective events" have been shown to be causally effective in scientific studies. [E.g., the placebo effect.]
All of which brings us to the seemingly insoluable "mind–body 'problem'." Which seems eminently unresolvable on the basis of physics and chemistry alone:
If [physico-chemical] reduction fails in some respect, this reveals a limit to the reach of the physical sciences, which must therefore be supplemented by something else to account for the missing elements. But the situation may be more serious than that. If one doubts the reducibility of the mental to the physical, and likewise of all those other things that go with the mental such as value and meaning, then there is some reason to doubt that a reductive materialism can apply even in biology, and therefore reason to doubt that materialism can give an adequate account even of the physical world. [Ibid.][My kind of atheist — an honest man!!! It seems to me sooner or later Professor Nagle will need to ask himself: WHY am I an "honest man?"... I mean, he could have taken the "other" path, but evidently didn't....]
Dear grey_whiskers, I think you want to go deeper into questions of the origins of moral law — not to mention such other critically important things as aesthetics, intuition, seemingly innate ideas such as symmetry, balance, beauty, truth, natural parsimony, etc., etc.
None of these things is explicable in principle by the physico-chemical laws.
But the fact that none can be explained in such terms does not negate their purely existential natural reality and efficacy within the universal cosmic order.
Oh, one last thing before I sign off. Above I suggested the quale (plural qualia) did not have a precise definition. To put that in perspective, recently I came across an extraordinarily precise and universal definition of life, couched in scientific terms:
What Is Life?Just some food for thought....
Life is a phenomenon in which organisms manifest collective and systematic, spontaneous, self-initiated changes serving teleological processes acting against physico-chemical equilibration.... life means spontaneous and teleological motion. [A. Grandpierre and M. Kafatos, "Biological Autonomy"; in Philosophical Study Vol. 2, No. 9, September 2012, El Monte, CA: David Publishing Company.]
Thank you ever so much, dear brother grey_whiskers, for pinging me to this interesting discussion!
Freepmail.
What Is Life?
I prefer the Dave Barry definition of Life:
Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.
A few years back there was a *very* erudite and sophisticated philosophical/functional definition of life, which I cannot now find: all I recall is that it was black text on a yellow background. I checked my bookmarks and didn't see it.
If I do, I will reply post-haste.
Cheers!