There is a story about blind philosophers touching an elephant. Fortunately, in the case of mind they all are touching the same elephant, contrary to some theor

There is a story about blind philosophers touching an elephant. Fortunately, in the case of mind they all are touching the same elephant, contrary to some theoretical physicists and dark matter/dark energy astronomers who are touching imaginary spherical elephants in vacuum, or french existentialists touching each other. This means that after pruning out, like in a search algorithm, obvious nonsense the remaining insights and formulated principles "describe" the same phenomena from different perspectives, so the process is still have good chances to converge to some approximation of what is (or truth or absolute, if we wish to use archaic terms) while other processes are not even convex (this is another analogy). So, dismissing a proper philosophy as unscientific is a bit premature, in my opinion. Sometimes metaphors are the only way to correctly express certain notions, which are foreign to our conditioned and specialized brains, like the notion of non-existence of time as a distinct phenomena, or that there are such things as appearances - patterns of sensory input which interpreted by the brain, conditioned to do it by the environment in which it has been evolved, to accept these perceptions as ultimately existing. Forth grade example with zooming form a solid into atoms and then "particles" would illustrate it best. For the system theorists the analogy would be that they are talking about implementation details, while philosophers are talking about higher lever, linguistic abstractions, the domain of what we call the mind. It is easy to see that linguistic abstractions of the mind does not necessarily exist, like angels or dark energy. The state of deep-sleep or losing of consciousness has been used as a counterargument to refute the separate good-created-soul dogmas back in the times of Upanishads. Nowadays we would say that some processes are suspended and then recreated, which at least refutes the dogma of separate, permanent self as a distinct entity. Obvious examples from software systems one could find himself. The good AI research, like a good philosophy, which could be characterized by pruning of nonsense and collecting non-contradictory general principles, with help of evolutionary and social psychology already got what is possible and how it works in principle. What they, obviously, do not know is how exactly it works (due to complexity) and how it came to be, but these are non-principal questions. At least, there is no doubt for a modestly educated person that most of mind-created appearances does not ultimately exist, like socially constructed dogmas or memes. Time, soul, self are a memes of the mind, if you wish. Implementation details are irrelevant.