Presents the author’s view of the best current positions on certain core philosophical and psychological problems. These positions together suggest a skeptical or nihilist perspective modified by evolutionary psychology and contemporary philosophy that embraces our desire to live as best we can and the relative and psychological reality of values, free will and other phenomena while recognizing limitations on their foundations and our understanding. Readers may want to start with the first entry. - Marc Krellenstein (personal info here)
As with the origin of the universe, it’s conceivable to imagine the discovery of concepts so different from those we now possess that a solution to the problem of explaining qualia will somehow be possible. But we have no reason to believe it for this problem either. It’s true that other past scientific problems — what makes something alive, for example — seemed unsolvable but were later solved. But no such scientific problem (other than, indeed, the problem of the ultimate origin of the universe) seems (or seemed) to have quite the conceptual difficulties of the consciousness problem.