[b]Patricia Churchland
Theorizing is of course essential to make progress in understanding, but theorizing in the absence of knowing available relevant facts is not very productive. [/b]
Cue the endless “general descriptions” here.
The neuroscience of consciousness is not going to stop in its tracks because some philosophers guesses that project cannot be productive.
How can it not be productive?
I had no idea what philosophy was until I went to college at UBC. I first read Hume and Plato, so naturally I was under the misapprehension that philosophers are trying to figure out what is true, and that contemporary philosophers are mainly trying to figure out what is true about the mind. Of course Hume and Plato were trying to do that, hence my misapprehension.
Let’s explain this “for all practical purposes”.
Even philosophers who did not mind psychology, claimed the brain was irrelevant because it was the hardware, and we only need to know about the software.
Let’s let nature decide.
Remember, in the heyday of vitalism, people said that when all the data are in about cells and how they work, we will still know nothing about the life force - about the basic difference between being alive and not being alive.
Not counting the ones here who know everything.
Analyzing a concept can (perhaps) tell you what the concept means (at least means to some philosophers), but it does not tell you anything about whether the concept is true of anything in the world.
I think.