How can science, whose subject matter is the external world, explain the internal world of sentience? Not only has it contributed nothing to this question, it was also never supposed to.
The absence of an answer is not proof of nonexistence or impossibility. It is just neutral absence. Absence as evidence is only """ valid""" when all possibilities are exhausted in a definite way. Outside of math, that threshold is exceedingly rare in problems of even moderate difficulty.
Moreover, this style of inquiry can easily be turned on its head and used to (apparently) redress the interlocutor... Neither are worthwhile endeavors.
I just didn't feel that making a bigger claim would really strengthen my argument.
There is tons and tons of research. As with all of science there is tons of crap among the good work. As with all of science, it requires a lot of work to understand the state of the art and build upon it.
Dismissing all of that says more about you than about our scientific understanding. Yes, we humans do prefer simple explanation that fit in our heads and that are easier to achieve. That's why so many people find more compelling to believe in conspiracy theories of various kinds: they offer a clear cut, simple and total explaination instead of the messy and partial understanding of a real, ongoing rational and scientific enquiry.
After all We do prefer explainations that "make sense". On a first glance, what's wrong with that? Isn't science also trying to figure out what "makes sense"?
There are plenty of examples where our intuitions clash with reality and in some case we ended up accepting that (e.g. most people can accept that we're living on a giant sphere even if it doesn't feel so), in some other cases we kinda-sorta accept it (quantum physics) and it other cases we flat out refuse to (questions around consciousness)
correlations between the bits in the video memory and the claimed IMDB score of the movie
I think you're looking for consciousness on the wrong level.
Imagine a being that is "conscious* of some experience, but lacks the ability of reflecting about the fact that it has just witnessed an experience. Is such a being "conscious"? Answers will vary but I suspect they vary because people are answering different questions. Some are thinking about the meta-consciousness and some about direct consciousness.
My layman interpretation of this fact is that consciousness/sentience doesn't originate in the cerebral cortex, but rather, within deeper brain structures.
By studying how that "internal world" emerges from the anatomy of the brain(neuroscience, neuropharmacology).
By querying that internal world in various interesting ways and studying the responses(psychology and behavioral biology).
By studying the theory of computation and its physical constraints(computer science, mathematics, physics).
And by studying language and its implications for cognition(linguistics).
Philosophers can't just sit in a bubble and figure this shit out on their own. They've tried that for milennia. At the very least their theories need to be physically, neurologically, and computationally possible...
Obviously science has things to say about these questions, even Chalmers would concede that.
I pose you a question. Can you prove, or suggest a way of discerning, whether this internal world, impenetrable to outside probing, actually exists? If you can't, do you think it's reasonable to stop all attempts at scientific inquiry without proof that it's hopeless?
I'm not on some crusade against the field of philosophy. Certainly philosophy has contributed mightily, and continues to do so. But I think physicalists like Dennet are making far more tangible contributions. Reading Dennet has been enlightening to me, he's one of the only philosophers I've found who can actually explain his philosophy to non-philosophers.
Chalmers on the other hand reads like a philosopher chasing his own homonculus. I don't find his arguments very clear and when I do manage to decipher him it seems to boil down to a stubborn insistence that fundamentally subjective experience must exist just because it sure as hell feels that way. I just don't see what the epistemic value is in keeping this neo-dualist baggage around. I don't see what it brings to the table. I see nothing that it explains that makes it necessary.
The hard problem of consciousness is an inherently dualist conception.
Goff for instance subscribes to the patently absurd view of panpsychism, where matter is posited to have subjective experience "built in" somehow. This is such an absurd view. He first posits that there must be some fundamental subjective experience. But then he can't actually come up with a cogent theory for it, so he then just posits that mind is fundamental to matter. So he's effectively just inventing new properties of nature out of whole cloth. But then even still he has no solid conception of what those properties are, what they do or how they interact to form a conscious mind in a brain. How is any of this helpful in any way? He took one dubious problem and projected it onto the entire universe, and gave himself another problem of emergence to boot. This is not progress, more like digging a hole for himself.
As for Searle, I'm not hugely familiar with his work, but I find his Chinese Room experiment, or rather his conclusions about it, misguided at best and wilfully ignorant at worst. The system reply, which I think is just obviously true, is simply dismissed with very little argument.
Again, I fail to find justification for fundamentally subjective experience other than it sure feels that way. That's more of a theological argument than a philosophical one.
The idea that Dennet is easier to read because he doesn't conform to the truth is pretty strange. He's clearly a very skilled writer and speaker. He's very good at avoiding a dense jungle of -isms, and when he does use them, he defines them very precicely and carefully. This to me is good philosophy. Dennet does a good job of laying out and explaining these ideas in a way that isn't completely convoluted. Argument is the core methodology of philosophy, and if a philosopher fails to represent their argument in clear way, why should I even take them seriously?
Philosophers are great at dressing up bad arguments in fancy, mystical, ill-defined terminology like "qualia". This to me is the philosophical equivalent of code smell. Whenever I read these closet dualists' arguments I have to pinch my nose.
Science may not yet be able to explain consciousness but it certainly can inform our understanding, and the work continues. If nothing else, it can help us understand what consciousness is not, and much has been learned about how a consciousness experiences certain degradations of the brain.
A good book on this is the late neurologist Oliver Sachs' "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat". It's a collection of interesting cases of exactly this sort. And Sachs was a wonderful author and speaker. Really recommend his talks as well.