The wisdom of this approach becomes more apparent upon noticing three things.

(1) There were lots of philosophical discussions about the nature of vision and perception. They were all radically bonkers. The concepts were wrong, the supposedly tricky problems were wrong, basically everything was wrong. Some philosophers had it so backwards that perception went out from the eye; no idea really survived contact with the retina. Indeed if you read about modern philosophical ideas of perception, you can hardly find any reference older than about a hundred years because everything before that was such complete rubbish it had to be discarded (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/). You can find, hidden away, bad ideas from Aristotle: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-psychology/suppl3.html, ones by Aquinas https://philpapers.org/rec/PERRST, bad ideas by Ibn Sina (Avicenna): https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1079048.pdf, Buddhism filtered by Chinese philosophers getting it so backwards that the nature of reality is inverted https://iep.utm.edu/chinese-philosophy-overview-of-topics/, and so on.

(2) There were also lots of philosophical discussions about the nature of life. Also dramatically far off from the actual detailed resolution (e.g. DNA as hereditary material). Vitalism was popular but wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism.

(3) Psychophysics has given us oodles of illusions that show us that our intuition about the workings of our brain are profoundly wrong, while cognitive science and medicine have demonstrated very compelling evidence that consciousness is a brain-generated phenomenon.

So at this point, it's eminently reasonable to say, "Look, philosophers, you have botched this kind of thing so badly before that we simply don't trust you to get really anything right here."

(However, the computer scientists do not have such an abysmal track record--I think the argument against a possible CS-only generation of consciousness is not very strong. I certainly wouldn't bet on it, but depending on how biological consciousness actually works, it might possibly be the kind of thing that CS could stumble into. Or maybe not. Depends how the biological one works--which we don't know yet.)