> I am dismissive because you make absolute statements as if there were formal proof

If I were writing a formal proof, you would know it. I have expressed my beliefs and explained as best I can the reasons for them with the extremely limited time that I had available to me.

As for "You are wrong", I softened that with the acknowledgement that you have plenty of company amongst philosophers, and that the subject has been a topic of vigorous debate for decades, and that reasonable people differ on this issue and that we weren't going to be able to resolve such a fraught issue in this limited forum.

You want more tip-toeing than that in a debate? Really? My Philosophy professors would just say directly to you in the middle of a class in front of everyone else, things like, "You are suffering from a profound misconception." This was just a challenge to you to either step up your argument or to ask them for more explication. They would not, however, mock you, or impute that you or half of all the Philosophers who study the topic are so ignorant that they are making an invisible unicorn argument.

As for attending classes for weeks to understand the issue: I have a Philosophy degree from MIT. I spent most of my actual work on Philosophy studying THIS particular issue. It took ME weeks in my first Philosophy of Mind class, when we got to this very topic to ultimately understand the issues involved. I wasn't slower than anyone else in the class either. In fact I'm a natural at Philosophy. I.e., I got an A on every single Philosophy paper I ever wrote. (And MIT does not have grade inflation.) As with most difficult philosophical issues, true understanding really only sets in when setting out to write a paper on the topic.

What's also somewhat unique about this particular philosophical divide is that no matter how much motivating either side does, many philosophers (e.g., even famous professional ones) cannot see the opposing viewpoint at all. No matter what is said, there is a certain contingent on both sides that basically just pounds their fists on the table in frustration that the other side won't even acknowledge that their side might have a valid point.

So what exactly am I supposed to tell you other than that I don't have the time to explain why I don't have the time to explain? (That's an inside joke from the video game Destiny, btw.)

If your point is that I wasted thousands of hours of my life studying this topic, point taken. As Wittgenstein claimed, studying Philosophy is more of a disease than anything else, since with most topics that it deals with, you can argue about the topic for hundreds of years without making much progress. But it's a disease that typically only afflicts people who are passionate and smart and who would like to understand something better, even if such understanding may be ultimately illusive.

> I am also dismissive because I don't see a succinct motivating example, paradox etc.

What makes you think that everything that's of interest can be motivated with a succinct example? Lisp is clearly the best programming language humans have ever devised and yet most programmers just dismiss it as having too many parentheses. If you can't convince people to use the best programming language no matter how much you explain the issues, why should you be able to convince a skeptic about a complex philosophical issue that is moot with respect to any practical concerns.

Though most people immediately do see why there might be a philosophical worry when you mention a robot duplicate of them, and how maybe it might feel different if you had a silicon brain rather than a meat brain. Or that it might not feel like anything at all. Most people just immediately get that there's a worry here. That's about as close as one can come to succinct motivating example. Also, most everyone who ever goes into Philosophy of Mind came up with the inverted spectrum hypothesis on their own when they were ten years old. If that doesn't describe you, then Philosophy of Mind will likely never be your cup of tea. (How can it be that they come up with this at a young age and then end up pounding the table later in life? Well, I'm not sure. I suppose that they've had an epiphany in the meantime, or they dismiss their ten-year-old philosophizing as childish musings.)

> Claiming that something is categorically unknowable and yet an important field of study is inconsistent.

You are suffering from a profound misconception. For instance, it is categorically unknowable in the general case what the morally right thing to do is. And yet ethics is still a field of the utmost importance. E.g., you can, after a whole lot of rumination and debate come up with, for instance, strategies that you might have good reason to believe will increase your likelihood of doing the morally right thing. Fingers crossed.

Also, if QM turns out to be consistent with the Many Worlds interpretation, it is categorically unknowable whether or not it is really the Bohm interpretation that is correct. On the other hand, you may come up with philosophical reasons to believe that one interpretation is more likely to be true than the other. And which is more likely might help you with other important philosophical issues.

Ultimately, this forum is just not the right place to have the sort of discussion that you seem to want to have because discussing the various arguments can be very involved and intricate. This forum is not the right place for such discussions and I don't have the free time right now anyway.

If you actually are interested, rather than just wanting to throw stones, we could move the discussion to Reddit or another forum, and I could provide better motivation for my beliefs on this issue when I have the time and inclination to do so properly.

I actually have my own novel argument on this topic. But it first relies on having some knowledge of Max Tegmark's argument that there's no difference between mathematical existence and physical existence and therefore all worlds that can be described mathematically and consistently are just as real as our world. I.e., our world is just pure math with no extra secret sauce to make it real. (Max Tegmark is a famous cosmologist, in case you don't already know.)