> I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

I think that even if science can reduce processes to simple understandable components, this doesn't take away from everyday life.

The fact that a book consists of characters doesn't make it worse.

The fact that you're simply a specific configuration of atoms* doesn't devalue you as a human being.

* or evolution of this configuration in time, but that's a story for another time

The fact that your neural system is entirely responsible for your thinking (conscious and unconscious) doesn't make your mind less fascinating.

I think you're attacking a straw man here. I agree that the mind is fascinating whether or not dualism is true. But at the same time, I think that the kind of hand-waving materialists do when faced with qualia, intentionality, and (what appears to be) objective morality is not very convincing.

Well, as a person who wears glasses, I can assure you to the contrary.