Fair enough, we can agree to disagree.

I think David Nickol's post in this chain is well thought out and, if unanswered, undermines your entire thesis. To the extent that you are trying to address comments here, it is deserving of a real response. Especially since you asked David to provide further explanation of his viewpoints "before [you] respond" to his points, and he obliged.

Just be clear (I can be slow sometimes): you've reconsidered and no longer thing "qualia" is evidence against the material mind?

Leah Libresco seems to fit the bill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1F35ExQnVE

"Do you know of anyone who was brought to a faith in Christ purely through the dispassionate application of logic, who never once came to the opinion that he was personally lost, was incomplete without God?? That's the point I was trying to make. I know of no such conversion story."

Danny, thanks for the reply. That may be the point you were trying to make, but it's not the one you made. You originally said that that the Thomistic arguments for God will never appear to a skeptic as more than "an entertaining intellectual game."

I've never claimed that anyone has come to faith in Christ purely through the dispassionate application of logic. Therefore, this isn't the question under discussion. The question is whether the classical arguments for God are more than "an entertaining intellectual game" and whether they've played a significant, though not exclusive, role in many people coming to God. I believe the clear answer to both of those questions is unequivocally "Yes."

Yes, you definitely just caught me trying to have my cake and eat it too. (Would you believe me if I told you it was unintentional? Self-contradiction comes so naturally to me.)

At the risk of completely departing from True Detective, I think I would ultimately side with Feser. And yes, he does argue that qualia is something of a non-problem for Aristotelians. Elsewhere he writes:

"It is no accident that the Aristotelian tradition regards sensation and imagination as entirely corporeal and in no way supportive of dualism. What contemporary philosophers call qualia and intentionality (or at least a rudimentary sort of intentionality that involves mere directedness without conceptual content) are, for the Aristotelian, simply ordinary corporeal features of certain kinds of ordinary material substances."

Qualia, in this reading, is another piece of philosophical shrapnel in the aftershock of a Cartesian conception of nature. It's the expression of a radical anti-reductionism that's really just the flip side of reductionism - two sides of one dirty coin. To think solely in those terms, Feser argues, is to accept a faulty foundation from the get-go.

I think Feser is probably right there. That said, we live and breath Cartesianism, like it or not. And I do think qualia remain an important conceptual challenge to materialism, and something to get us thinking seriously about the possibility that we are not simply bodies, but composites of body and spirit.

But you're completely justified in calling me out: I can't have it both ways.

Nicholas,
Yes, as a general matter in life and reason, if things about a claim or proposal don't make sense, I expect the person making the claim to either provide a good explanation, or acknowledge that this is a reason to doubt the claim.
But in the case of your proposal about the soul and my response: I wasn't actually looking for answers to my questions. Phrasing them as questions was more of a rhetorical choice. I was just explaining why I don't think your proposal holds together.

Yeah, I agree with your history of our interaction. I was trying to describe why I think your reasons why the analogy doesn't make sense is a symptom of attacking my analogy from the wrong angle and I wanted to connect to this to a larger point that most atheists just irrationally dismiss religious claims because it doesn't offer answers to questions they think it should if it really was making true claims. Most of your objections, like here, just assume that if God really was speaking through the Catholic Church, that it would give an answer to a question they want instead of maybe thinking, "Am I assuming too much in thinking that these answers really would be availableavailable even if all of the other claims are true?"

You asked me if I thought the conception of souls you described made sense to me. I told you why it doesn't make sense to me. Not sure what you really want from me.

If you have ideas on how to bridge the gap between materialism and Catholic theology, feel free to share, and I"ll give them respectful attention.

Not to pick on Matthew, but I would add that here he makes the “problem of qualia” a cornerstone of his argument, and then here he uses as support for another argument a link to a piece by Edward Feser in which Feser denies there is a problem of qualia.