"it feels like I'm telling philosophers that their life's work has been a waste of time."

If my immediate interest is to trigger a subject's saliva reflex, it would be a much better use of my time to vividly describe to the subject the sensations of biting into a lemon than it would to inquire after the algorithms that give rise to lemony sensations.

I am reductionist, but I can't quite imagine an intellectual life that abstracted away all conscious interest in phenomenological structure in favor of monomaniacal attention to the base structure. Then again, there's no accounting for taste. (Or is there?)