Mindfulness or Mindlessness?

[The Grand Nudger]

If they weren’t actually conscious, they wouldn’t be able to consider the idea one way or the other. 😛

Of course they can consider - they're just not conscious - in the thought experiment. That's sort of the point. Consideration doesn't require consciousness, so...why are we conscious (if we are) and what accounts for that I (if anything). The pzombie fails nagels criteria (and our own internal reference) by fiat to explore the implications of that state of affairs. Mostly, because those implications (and not the pzombes) are the useful item to people who argue from there to whatever else.

Dennet, for example, famously thinks that pzombies are a logical impossibility, if a creature was like us in every way..it would be like us in every way. This is also his response to mary the color blind color scientist..if she knows everything about color, she knows what it's like to experience color though she may not personally experience it. - However, the way he describes human consciousness makes other people think that they're pzombies.

Personally, I think it comes down to something brutally simple. A pzombie is a just a fancy calculator, and people don't want to be fancy calculators. A synthesis between nagel and dennet might be something like - anything that possesses any apprehension of what it's like to be is conscious..but consciousness is not exactly what it appears to be and/or reports itself as. For whatever reason (or no reason at all)..our consciousness, whatever it is, is appalled by the thought of being a physical thing. Even the most hardcore physicalist believes that there's a meaningful difference between their I and a toaster.

---

Sure. My comment about question-begging was in response to an article I was reading about the pzombie experiment being proffered as an argument against monism, specifically.  That’s where my confusion stemmed from.

Specifically, it would be question begging if the argument used that assertion to prove that pzombies existed - but that's not what the argument contends to do...so it isn't. In the thought experiment, the pzombie is a direct observation and not an assertion - we're having a discussion about consciousness with it.