What's the point of philosophy any more?

[bennyboy]

Take consciousness for example. You'd think that this would be ideal for philosophy but it's not going to determine what it is because it isn't set up to investigate it and to collect data about it. For that you'd need neuroscience, psychology and artificial intelligence. Philosophy can come along afterwards collecting together all the results from the different sciences and drawing conclusions from them, but the ground work first needs to be done by fields with names which aren't 'Philosophy'.

You are discarding philosophy by making an unwarranted philosophical assumption-- a whole chain of them, really.

First of all, your definition of consciousness is going to be hotly challenged by anyone who's not already a material monist.  With regard to a traditional dualist or other world view, you have to either:

1) redefine consciousness in physical terms rather than experiential ones: "Consciousness is the ability to process information from the environment and react to it."
2) make assumptions that beg the question-- for example, that the world is basically as it seems to be, but without explaining why it is so.

Both of these have serious philosophical problems.  In the former case, I would say, "That's fine, but I'm not interested in robots.  I'm interested in the experience of what it's like to be, and I don't think science has even the beginnings of a coherent theory of why I can do that"  In the latter, I would argue that science itself very much undermines the assumptions upon which it largely rests.  The world does not seem to us to be a collection of undefined wave functions, but that's what it is; seeming is over-rated.

--edit--
Since I'm on a rant, let me explain what I think is the most important function of philosophy: it's to define the scope of ideas, i.e. the context in which they are to be considered valid. I cannot prove that anyone else than myself exists, however I find it useful and quite compelling to assume that people are in fact other thinking and feeling entities. My social interactions are defined in that scope: all moral ideas, all political ideas are valid only in the context of real-other.

Science is defined by a belief in an objective physical existence-- something which is compelling but not provable, by observation or otherwise. If you use only science as a tool for investigating reality, then you'll eventually come to the conclusion that all reality consists of an objective physical existence and nothing more than that. This is a scope error-- you are applying knowledge gained within that context to all possible contexts.