Psience Quest

https://philosophyofbrains.com/2021/09/2...tions.aspx

I came across this on reddit today and I find it quite interesting. It's a critique of the intuitions that are used to frame the conception of philosophical zombies. Specifically, it says that the words used, "zombies", biases people into thinking a specific way, when in reality the intuitions aren't very commonplace. Their study seems to back that up, along with a number of other studies they did in response to the comments they recieved on the original. 

My feelings on philosophical zombies have always been pretty neutral, but it's interesting to see such a powerful critique against one of the big arguments for the hard problem of consciousness.

I think the zombie thing has always been somewhat minor outside of philosophical circles. It is too esoteric of an argument. But even children understand the gap between qualitative and quantitative, as per the game where a family member says, "I love you" and the kid replies "I love you times 10"....and the back & forth goes on until "I love you times Infinity!" is the final joke.

The big issue re: the Hard Problem is starting with matter that has no consciousness and some how producing consciousness. Physicalists do themselves no favors when they try to say consciousness is an illusion, because that seems even less coherent than saying it magically emerges from matter or the brain is just a special "meat-based" computer.

Edit: Chalmers sums it up well, along with the fact that lay people have had to have "p-zombie" explained to them. It's the argument that's convincing, not just the term, otherwise the Hard Problem would not be so compelling. See also Liu's critique of the experiment.

Also this issue has been known long before Chalmers, the famous atheist and critic of Christianity Bertrand Russell noted a blind man could know the whole of physics but could not grasp colors.