The Scripture Is False And The Biblical God Is Dead.

[emjay]

My zombie-dogs would salivate, yes; I also agree that fear is part of process, ie conditional on causes and relationships, but just that those causes and relations under epiphenomenalist thinking would be manifested entirely within the physical correlates of consciousness, ie neurons and the brain.

A zombie dog may salivate, but we'd have to wonder why..as it would not hunger, no more than it could fear.  That's what it's (supposed to be) missing - even though all of the same causes and relationships and physical correlates - an identical brain, identical nuerons... exist.   

 Perhaps you could consider them different levels of description; fear is a phenomenal experience, but it's also... or corresponds in some way to... a specific neural state of activity. As does hearing a sound, associating that sound with other neural representations, and triggering other neural events (ie salivating), same for a learned fear response... at either level of description they can be considered the same process, but just with epiphenomenalism asserting that the phenomenal side is causally inert... basically just a representation of the underlying physical processes.

Zombie dogs don't hear sounds, either.  As before, all things are equal.  They possess the structures, air is being compressed, same brain and processes....same behavioral response...but do not and cannot be hearing it.

Okay, at least for the sake of argument, I'll try and accept your way of talking about it, accepting that mine is most probably flawed, but it nonetheless is how I think about it. Ie in this context I think of hearing as a process, which consists of phenomenal hearing and/or the underlying physical processes that correspond with it. You consider it only the phenomenal experience of hearing. Your view is correct I'm sure, and probably the simplest dictionary definition, but nonetheless when I'm grappling with all of this, my way is how I conceptualise it in my mind. But for the sake of this argument, yes we can agree, zombie-dogs don't hear per se... but they do some equivalent underlying physical process, which results in identical real world consequences, is what I contend.

Motivation is something that I think the zombies and ep have trouble with.   Ever considered the the paradox of phenomenal judgement in ep?   If our behavior can change based on the acquisition of some phenomenal fact, how can we state that phenomenal contents are a dead end for interaction?  How, for that matter, do we even possess the knowledge of such an acquisition, unless the phenomenal content has interacted with whatever purportedly physical thing our cognition depends on...?  Or....to put it even more directly as an assertion rather than a series of questions.....  

...If our phenomenal content was incapable of interaction with physical events then we wouldn't have any knowledge of such content, to be explained by ep, in the first place.  If we do have knowledge of phenomenal contents, and these contents as-such thus need some satisfying explanation...then it seems that they've not only interacted with physical events/structures/processes - they've motivated you/that structure/those processes to change your/their/it's behaviors and explore the subject in depth.

(there are, ofc, responses to this - non causal acquaintance theories of knowledge - which your post above put me in the mind of)

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to be obstinate, I do most certainly appreciate your viewpoints on all of this, but there does still seem to be some fundamental or subtle misunderstanding between us, because my answer remains pretty much the same for all of these questions; whatever you experience phenomenally has underlying physical processes (unless you're contending that they don't?, or that some don't?), and therefore any phenomenal fact we learn has a corresponding physical process, just as much as any of the consequences of that fact... we're just looking at them in terms of different levels of description, the physical level and the phenomenal. In practical terms, if it's contended to be a mirror image, then phenomenal consciousness may as well be considered causal... and thus be on full equal terms with the physical underbelly, but just the possibility that that's not the case, as it's envisioned that both levels of description have exactly the same outcomes, then ep and pz's seem to remain conceivable.