Exhibit a
> Nagel begins by assuming that "conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon" present in many animals (particularly mammals), even though it is "difficult to say [...] what provides evidence of it".
I think we've made extraordinary progress on things like brain to machine interfaces, and demonstrating that something much like human thought can be approximated according to computational principles.
I do think some sort of theoretical bedrock is necessary to explain to "something there's like to be" quality, but I think it would be obtuse to brush aside the rather extraordinary infiltrations into the black box of consciousness that we've made thus far, even if it's all been knowing more about it from the outside. There's a real problem that remains unpenetrated but as has been noted elsewhere in this thread, it is a nebulous concept, and perhaps one of the most difficult and important research questions, and I think nothing other than ordinary humility is necessary to explain the limit an extent to which we understand it thus far.