Yes we’re getting to the point that the dismissal can’t just be automatic, but exclaiming “you can’t prove I’m wrong” isn’t much of a basis for defending your position with you can only defend otherwise with shallow similarities.
Came here to say the same thing. Neuroscience can give us one answer, but neuron-like "things", whether real or artificial, need not be the only way to build sentient beings.
It's something like the dark matter of the field. Physicists can say that it really appears that there is something there because of how galaxies behave, they can see evidence of a thing really being there but have nothing but guesses and handwaving to explain what.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
We live in a world of dualism mind and body, but this is typically unacceptable to most philosophers. Generally the problem breaks down to:
Materialism -> Consciousness is probably an illusion.
Idealism -> The material world is an illusion and/or consciousness is in everything regardless of material.
Modern NN tech views -> Consciousness is a material-independent orchestra of neural networks
Superstitions -> god(s) grants consciousness to specific beings and not others
That said, I think it's plausible to come pretty close to figuring it all out if we have enough time and experimentation. E.g. we now have very good evidence that most mammals have similar experience to our own through better understanding of language acquisition and evolution. This wasn't always the case. We don't know what we don't know, and something out there may provide a serious breakthrough in building a model of philosophy of mind that is convincing.
The quantitative argument is a red herring. Science is one of the disciplines in the business of explaining things, not in the business of calculating values, but it just so happens that when you get into the details, quantifying properties leads to better explanations. For example, I can give a qualitative explanation for why it rains, which can be expanded into a quantitative one.
The subjectivity of experience can be attributed to the scientifically-explainable inability of our conscious mind to directly access the physical state of the brain. If arguments such as "Mary the Neuroscientist" show anything, it is that phenomenal experiences can not be conveyed by any language, scientific or otherwise, so if you are demanding an explanation must do that, neither science nor philosophy nor anything else will explain consciousness.
Consciousness, being internal and subjective, exists at odds with anything else that science considers. Sure, study cognition and neurology, but there's an ontological gap between those and experience.
To claim an ontological gap is to put the cart before the horse. If or when we understand consciousness, we will be able to tell if there is a relevant ontological gap, or whether it is an illusion generated by our ignorance.
I agree with the second bit you are saying - we cannot convey these experiences so it is outside the realm of science.
Would you say that rain is inexplicable because no explanation can actually cause rain?
Plenty of current neuroscience fields were once only a question for philosophy but have graduated into matters of science (Kant has plenty of opinions about things which can easily be replaced with actual neuro- knowledge, for example)
There's a slightly ironic moment where the author mentions the pushback Ilya Sutskever got for tweeting "It may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious." This is not a view to which I would assign much credence, but it is more or less axiomatic (though in a different sense, perhaps) in some forms of panpsychism that I am also rather skeptical of (what on Earth does Goff mean when he says that electric charge is a form of consciousness?)