What's the point of philosophy any more?

[I_am_not_mafia]

And it didn't require a philosopher to point out that paradigm shifts happen. The history of science tells us that.

Why do we need wheat farmers? Bread comes from the supermarket, after all.

That analogy fails because at the moment the supermarket is growing its own wheat and selling it because the wheat farmers are growing imaginary plants.

Take emotions for example. There has been so little progress made on understanding emotions until very recently when science started to investigate it.  Like consciousness, they lead to an extremely subjective experience. Neuroscience tells us that emotions come before our conscious rationalisation of  why we act the way we do. Evolutionary psychology tells us that cognition widens the range of options available to an agent acting within an environment whilst emotions will narrow them to a range of evolved responses. Emotional behaviours that may seem irrational become rational when viewed over evolutionary time scales.

Neuroscience tells us that what we experience as emotion is the process of chemical neuromodulators in our brain acting to excite or inhibit entire neuronal areas. AI and computer modelling of the brain reveals that it is a bio-physical self-organising system that is constantly trying to settle into a stable state and that emotions make it more or less difficult to do so. It also tells us that such emotions can be used for switching seamlessly between exploration and exploitation of our environment and that they provide high impact signals carrying low information.

Armed with this understanding you can start to appreciate the similarities in your own subjective experience with that of others. Other people's emotions then start to make sense regardless of whether or not they are consciously aware of why they act the way they do.

But none of this progress would have been made without new evidence, new data, creating models and testing whether our assumptions bear out in simulation and then comparing the results with objective measurements. None of this progress would have been made without science. It would have been useful if philosophers had been keeping an eye on the different fields and connecting the dots. Instead it was left up to the specialists to learn about other specialisms while the philosophers were arguing about what qualia is.

There is a reason why no one ever hires philosophers to be professional philosophers except to teach a new generation of philosophy students.