Actually, I think most people accept the existence of qualia.

It probably helps that my background is in the sciences and I can speak the scientists' language.

Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with.

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.

Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes.

Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

People have managed to avert their eyes and hope for the best.