QUOTE : I began lamenting the terrible social consequences of materialism and my view that the less-than-laudable moral condition of America in general and Santa Cruz in particular (I was grumpy from overwork and have never been particularly enamored of the moral condition of Santa Cruz in any event) could be laid at the feet of nearly three centuries of materialist ascendancy. The reigning belief that the thoughts we think and the choices we make reflect the deterministic workings of neurons and, ultimately, subatomic particles seemed to me to have subverted mankind’s sense of morality. The view that people are mere machines and that the mind is just another (not particularly special) manifestation of a clockwork physical universe had infiltrated all our thinking, whether or not someone knew a synapse from an axon. Do you know what the most addressable cause of all this moral decrepitude is?, I asked Dave. Materialism! Not the materialism of Rodeo Drive, SUVs, and second homes in Telluride, but materialism as a worldview, a view that holds that the physical is all that exists, and that transcendent human mental experiences and emotions, no matter what grandeur they seem—from within—to possess, are in reality nothing but the expressions of electrical pulses zipping along neurons. Chalmers wouldn’t be the first (or the last) to express incredulity that I was blaming the moral morass of the late twentieth century on a school of philosophy that most people had never heard of.