Mindfulness or Mindlessness?

[emjay]

There are all sorts of fun ways to describe the issue (or potential issue) as some see it.  Here's one I enjoy - that you might.

Imagine a race of dogs complete with dog philosophers of mind and dog scientists.  They believe that they have a thing they call dognomenal content, or dognomenal states.  This is rich and directly apprehended content meaningful to them and deeply woven into how they perceive the world and themselves along those lines you might expect for a dog.  The feel of the atomic weight of an element, off the top of my head.  The important thing to remember, is that whatever imagined dog experience you come up with, human beings absolutely don't have it, and don't even possess the required structures to have it..no matter whether we report a what-it's-like-ness to smell or can accurately give them the atomic weight of an element.  We seem like them..but we're just not.

Would that race of dogs be justified in considering us dzombies?  Are the dog brain scientists justified in not seeing dognomenal states in humans?  Are the dog philosophers justified in believing that we are not conscious, on account of lacking those dognomenal states?  Is the combined institution of dog science and dog philosophy justified in asserting that human processing cannot explain or even help to explain dog consciousness?

Thanks but I'm gonna bow out now. It was nice to see you again, but this stuff just goes so over my head, and it will just get worse as we go along, so I'm gonna quit while I'm behind. It just doesn't feel like it clarifies any of my pzombie concerns but only muddies the waters, or just sidesteps them. I know you're trying to find intuition pumps, but this isn't really pumping for me, as my issues with pzombies are not about the form of experience (ie the phenomenal content that we can assume differs greatly between different species etc), but just the experience of phenomenal content full stop, whatever form it takes, and in whatever organism/system it occurs. But as I've said I realise my own concerns are such a philosophical rabbithole, that it seems pointless/futile to even discuss them.