Comment by tsimionescu
6 hours ago
I don't see how his views can be made sense of without dualism. He believed very much in this concept of qualia as some special property, and in the logical coherence of the concept of p-zombies, beings that would exactly like a conscious being but without having qualia. This simply makes no sense unless you believe that consciousness is a non-physical property, one that the physical world acts upon but which can't itself act back upon it (as otherwise, there would obviously have to be some kind of meaningful physical difference between the being that possesses it and the being that doesn't).
> This simply makes no sense unless you believe that consciousness is a non-physical property
It does make sense, and there's work being done on this front, (Penrose & Hameroff's Orch OR comes to mind). We obviously don't know exactly what such a mechanism would look like, but the theory itself is not inconsistent. Also, there's all kinds of p-zombies, so we likely need some specificity here.