In Chapter 1, I introduced the metaphysical folly as the tendency for unreflective naturalists to believe in an imagined nature constructed in their imaginations as being more real than the world we perceive with our senses.

A symptom of the metaphysical folly is the move from Sense impressions give unreliable knowledge of nature, nature is instead truly X to Sense impressions are incompatible with the concept that the world is X, so qualia must not exist. But the one thing we can be sure of is that qualia exist. Therefore, as Galen Strawson [85] and other philosophers of mind [86] emphasize, if we are naturalists and believe everything that exists is part of the natural world then qualia must be also part of the natural world. The right statement – if we are naturalists – must be:

Here I would like to argue that it is much easier to conceive of qualia as part of the natural world in temporal naturalism than in timeless naturalism.