Question
Why doesn’t the mind-body problem bother atheists?
Answer
The two are pretty much unrelated. This is like asking why worries about pink bunnies taking over the world don't keep physicists working on a unified field theory up at night.
"God" is not a metaphysically interesting concept to even think about for atheists, whether it is a personal, anthropomorphic variety or one of those more abstract "universal consciousness" type models.
We atheists just take on that label because social convention demands that we have an opinion on that particular construct.
The mind-body problem though, is a genuine metaphysical mystery, and 99.9999% of the interesting things that can be said about it have no relation to theology. See David Chalmers' work (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dav... ) for an example of the sorts of things people ACTUALLY think about if they are interested in the mind-body problem. And yes, this can keep people awake at night (it has certainly done so for me), and theology has no real role to play in this sleeplessness (other than as a red herring to be cleared away).
"God" is not a metaphysically interesting concept to even think about for atheists, whether it is a personal, anthropomorphic variety or one of those more abstract "universal consciousness" type models.
We atheists just take on that label because social convention demands that we have an opinion on that particular construct.
The mind-body problem though, is a genuine metaphysical mystery, and 99.9999% of the interesting things that can be said about it have no relation to theology. See David Chalmers' work (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dav... ) for an example of the sorts of things people ACTUALLY think about if they are interested in the mind-body problem. And yes, this can keep people awake at night (it has certainly done so for me), and theology has no real role to play in this sleeplessness (other than as a red herring to be cleared away).