A good way to "unstump" such people, is to ask, "Is there such a thing, as what it's like to be you? When Thomas Nagel used some such phrase in his essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", a lot of light bulbs were switched on.
Any experiencer, once his attention is properly directed, shall be certain that experience exists. Science, on the other hand, would be perfectly consistent with the non-existence of experience and experiencers.
> Any experiencer, once his attention is properly directed, shall be certain that experience exists.
Not so. You're referring to qualia, and this is a much debated and unsettled topic, but really "exists" is the wrong word to apply to it. To "exist" means to "have objective reality or being." IMHO, qualia no more exist than Superman does, it's a trick of perception created by your mind to help understand the world, a subjective experience of imagination.
To put a software metaphor on it, qualia are no different than your web browser, it runs on the computer, but no examination of the computer itself will find what you think of as the web browser within it, it's just a collection of bits in memory just as qualia is a collection of patterns in the brain. What you experience (qualia or the browser) and what actually exists in the hardware are vastly different things, both are illusions created in a running system that bear no resemblance to the collections of patterns in the hardware that creates them.
However, as it's a hot topic of debate among philosopher's there's no real point in rehashing what can be easily looked up on Wikipedia to see what all the current opinions are. However, the burden of proof is on those claiming it exists, not on those who critique the idea. As no such evidence exists, then it's nothing more than a hypothesis at best; and a very old one at that.
A good way to "unstump" such people, is to ask, "Is there such a thing, as what it's like to be you? When Thomas Nagel used some such phrase in his essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", a lot of light bulbs were switched on.
Any experiencer, once his attention is properly directed, shall be certain that experience exists. Science, on the other hand, would be perfectly consistent with the non-existence of experience and experiencers.