If I was going to sum up my approach to this whole mind issue, I would say this: the question is often formulated in a very bad way - for example, by posing the question in terms of stuff. It's better to start with the things we do know: for example, that there are people and other thinking creatures, who have mental capacities. Our next step should be to say something about these capacities.

I think we atheists should tolerate the religious not because their views are just as valid as ours, but because experience has shown that we are unlikely to convert them, and so we have to find some way to live in peace with them, even if we find their views false or otherwise objectionable.

Problems come and go over time, and to understand why is a difficult historical task. If one wanted to find the origin of a problem, historical research and close attention to texts is what is needed, not unconstrained speculation about the 'pictures' that philosophers must be in the grip of.

The thing I think I have learned from Wittgenstein is the importance of not making things up: philosophers should not invent problems, and they should also be conscious of the risk of inventing pointless 'technical' machinery which do not offer real explanations, but often just re-state the known facts in a more complex way.

Taken as hypotheses, religious claims do very badly. Yet the striking fact is that this does not worry Christians.

I think you can have a science of the taste of chicken soup, or the taste of Chateau Latour. My point is only that knowing this science alone will not tell you what chicken soup or Chateau Latour tastes like.

We have no proper understanding of the relationship between conscious thought and conscious sensation. The various forms of thought and sensation are underpinned by very different neural mechanisms; so how can the neural correlate of their conscious natures be the same? I don't think we are yet in a position to make such speculations. To make progress, we have to have a good conception of the phenomenology of consciousness, among other things.