I'm sure that some philosophers, like many non-philosophers, are dodgy when asked a question. This tendency can be fueled by worries about unpopularity or future recriminations, for example. I'm also sure that some questions deserve dodgy answers. If you ask me whether you should give up your job in order to take care of your mother, I will be rightly reluctant to give you a direct answer since I cannot have knowledge all of the relevant considerations (even if you try to share them all with me), and since this is not the sort of decision that one person should make for another. I suspect, however, that most cases of what you are calling "dodgy" answers are actually just very complex answers -- answers that spend a lot of time trying to clarify the terms of the question, and answers that include lots of conditionals (If ____, then ____; but if ___, then ____; etc.). If you ask whether or not we have free will, for example, I will first want to say quite a lot about the different things...

I agree with your observation that (at least for the most part) beliefs will make us happy on account of their content, not on accout of how they are formed -- rationally versus irrationally. And unlike Alexander George, I think that this observation presents a significant challenge to Peter Smith's claim that irrational beliefs are not likely to lead to actions that get us what we want -- since actions that result from false but happy-making beliefs may often create more happiness than actions that result from true but sad-making beliefs. A simple, and common, example is the case where a seriously ill person's false and irrational belief that they are now out of danger actually helps them to recover. Another common example is that of the person whose overconfidence actually improves their likelihood of success.

There is one very general reason and two more specific reasons that philosophers are interested in the question of whether consciousness is identical to a particular bodily state. The general reason is this: we are interested in knowing what the most basic constituents of the world are, and how they are related. If consciousness is not identical to a bodily state, then wewant to know what sort of thing it is and how it seems to be able tointeract with the body. But if consciousness is identical to a particular pattern of brain waves, for example, then we are justified in thinking that mental states are not something different than physical states and consciousness can be understood through the study of the brain. In short, we want to clarify different categories of existence, eliminating the confusions that result from thinking that there are two (or more) things when there is just one, or thinking that that there is just one thing when there are actually two (or more). A more...