Tentatively Christian; looking for a reasonable discussion

[JuliaL]

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...while Joe is asleep, Joe isn't Joe …the split…where Joe either can or can't find the word for chicken when shown a chicken depending on which eye it is shown to….[or] with dissociative identity disorder where Joe comes and goes and gets replaced by Ralph or Fred.

Indeed. Your examples all present interesting problems. Approaching these sorts of problems from a nominalist position, like you do, produces many paradoxes. I think one would first have to distinguish to what kind of universal does the particular instance, Joe, belong. It would seem to me Joe remains in essence human, and the personal ego identity, Joe, comes from accidental features.

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… the thing that corresponds to Joe is the set of organized brain states which, by social convention, is recognized as 'Joe' when it is seen and recognized as 'Joe.

I guess that position kinda undermines the idea that Joe’s, or anyone else’s’, life can have meaning since Joe is nothing more than an arbitrary boundary between one socially determined* collection of material permutations and the rest of the material world.

And your problem with this is?
Is meaning supposed to be some absolute gas hanging out in the nothing that can't exist?
Why not be satisfied with the local meanings we as individuals apply to states of affairs?
Personally, I envision a hierarchical network of conditions that offer levels of meaning to each. Each level is contextual to the individual asking the question. The microbe is interested in its local chemical environment, the multi-cellular animal is interested in finding food and the society at large is interested in keeping from being overrun by the society next door. Meaning for each will differ, but is still meaning.

…Self-aware neural networks are pretty easy to make…at that point, philosophers discussing qualia, like those learned physicians who advocated the 'miasma theory' for the cause of cholera will have to shut up and die off.

I think you bite off more than you can chew. The problems of qualia and intentionality would still remain unresolved. Besides, neo-Scholasticism doesn’t have the same kind of mind-body problem as modern analytic or continental philosophy.

*Which begs the question since the notion of a distinct social group is also an arbitrary boundary.

I only indulge in philosophy to the extent necessary to keep philosophers at bay.
My basic belief is that, no matter how much we learn, we are physically & mentally limited and there will be things to not know. This state can, if allowed, provide a 'philosopher of the gaps' niche where authoritative speculation provides both motivation and reward to its members. If you can give the size of synchrotron needed for energy levels high enough to image 'the underpinnings of being itself' I can help you get it funded. Until that time, speculative bullshit remains speculative bullshit and like the poor, will always be with us. The problems of qualia, solipsism, & inference have had no closed solutions despite continuous discussion by better minds than mine for thousands of years. I don't expect an answer and am quite comfortable in that. The parallel with Koch's postulates offered is a solution which, in its pragmatism, pushes the philosophical purists a little farther into irrelevancy where they belong. Like Clinton, you can argue all day on what the meaning of 'is' is. But the physical theorists and experimentalists are the ones who have provided us with terrabyte drives. I'm on their side.