An Obvious Advantage of Eliminativism

As one of my professors said, if I’m a reductionist about qualia, then there is a lot of really hard problems to solve – I have to close the explanatory gap, explain how the physical interacts with qualia, and so on. But, if I’m an eliminativist about qualia, (meaning it's eliminated from the ontology) many of the 'hard problems' disappear. In which case there is an explanatory gap, but that fits perfectly with my eliminativism because there’s an explanatory gap regarding miracles too. And if we are eliminativists about miracles, that escapes our ontology and we do not need to explain how they work.

The reason people do not argue this way is because eliminativism about qualia is supposed to be extremely implausible and counter-intuitive. But, if we can get past this initial plausibility, we might be able to reap the benefit of turning various “problems” and especially the "hard problem" about qualia into simple pseudo-problems which do not require solutions. For example, how does the physical give rise to qualia? It doesn’t; there aren’t any qualia.

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