What's the point of philosophy any more?

[The Grand Nudger]

Thomas Nagel asks the question "What is it like to be a bat?"

A scientist may fully understand a bat's physiology and fully understand how it uses sonar to navigate its nocturnal environment but something is left unexplained. There is a certain sensation and experience that the bat has when it uses sonar--the qualia involved.

What about the sensation of pain? You might understand every neural pathway activated by a pin prick to the finger. Even if you had privilege to view every change in someone's brain states when his/her finger is being pricked with a pin, the first-person experience of the pin prick (pain) would not be discernible to you.

As John Searle puts it, conscious experience is causally reducible but not ontologically reducible to brain states.

A variation of the colorblind color scientist.  Where we posit that some scientist knows everything about color, but..being blind..lacks one thing..forgetting that we began by asserting that they knew everything about color..and what it would look like to some creature x is certainly part of "everything about color". It's interesting that we don't conceptualize any other thing in this way.   When we use a voltmeter we say that we've observed electricity, a thermometer..temperature....but if we (had and) read a "painometer"...we... won't be doing that..?

How would experience be invalid?  It's not a position, a philosophy, or a world view.  I don't see that there's anything about it that CAN be invalid.  What can be invalid are interpretations about the objectivity of experienced objects-- but that's really not the same thing.

I don't think a sense of self can be, or need be, interpreted.  It's not a conclusion or an inference.  It's just a label for whatever-it-is.

It would be invalid in the same way you declared any other thing invalid (or, not).  If you invalidate some other thing by reference to it's subjectivity your subjective experience of self is invalidated.  If you invalidate some other thing by referring to it as an interpretation your interpretation of self is invalid.  These are redundant, two ways to say the same thing.

I'm not telling you that it is, I'm noting that consistency of your position on these matters demands that it would be for the reason you lay out.

Responding to both of the above comments with a single line of thought...I think that it may be that our minds are so special to us....so integral, that we import that attachment into our notions that they are somehow mechanically or functionally special. That there's something irreducible, or something we can't see or even -couldn't- see gong on..even when the same language applied to any other thing would be utter nonsense. The first and grandest of all special pleading cases, one we're literally born into. Personally, I think it was far easier to rationalize this when we were completely ignorant of the fact that the brain was relevant to the subject, and even after that when we were still unaware of how to mechanically implement systems like logic...and that's the point in time that the mind body problem and the philosophic tradition surrounding it arises from (it was conceptualized then..ofc as the soul/body problem, so at least it's made a little progress...lol). Rather than incorporate what is...granted, nowhere near a complete understanding of that...that tradition chose instead to find ways to dissemble over what is nevertheless an immense body of observation in order to reassert and maintain it's traditional relevance.

It's in this context that a persons dissatisfaction with philosophy might find it's root...but it's worth pointing out that there is a (philosophic) theory of mind for just about every discipline and observation that we've since learned to be relevant to mind, as well. That, for example...a scientist engaged in this research -is- being gainfully employed as a "philosopher of mind". That people will use Matthildas ai research, if and where they can, to provide insight on mind wherever it can. That these people are armed with more information, armed with more sound propositions and a better method of generating further sound propositions and a less ambiguous language to communicate them than any who came before them. It makes little sense..to this mind...to reassert or assent to the tyranny of a tradition based in a meaningful and relative ignorance...though it does help to have the counterpoint as a guard against potential overreach.

In effect - we ask how these traditional problems can be overcome by some position, and the position describes how that's done...it makes little sense after asking and hearing that answer, to reassert "but you -can't- overcome problem x". They just did, or at least showed one way it could be. What would be required to competently criticize those positions is not a reassertion that no observation could touch it, but a demonstration that the observations are inaccurate. For example..that no one can demonstrate a "neural state" upon which some conclusion rests. Not the insistence that their ability to demonstrate a neural state is somehow insufficient in ways that demonstrating a state of potential electrical or actual thermal difference is not. The latter, though commonly employed to argue against some position..is no less than a complete concession -to- that position. If we concede (even for the purposes of argument) that this x is the neural state of pain..we have observed and explained pain in exactly the same way as we observe or explain any other thing.

If this doesn't satisfy us, then we haven't observed electricity, or temperature, or any other x in-kind either...and we find ourselves in the conceptual black hole all over again.