Philosophical zombies

[emjay]

so in consciousness we have this perception of unity... of a single thing that can experience... but in the physical world, any given state of consciousness would be represented by a certain physical state of many different interacting particles etc; nowhere to pin it down to any 'thing' experiencing. 

We report unity of perception. This, ofc, is not an accurate description of the operation of the system so far as we can tell..so there's no need to take it down to the level of interacting particles. Brain function is distributed regardless of what it reports itself as.

Yeah, I get what you're saying (I think); regardless of whatever user illusion we have, it corresponds with a distributed system in the physical world, so to look for a single point in the physical world would be a conflation of terms. That's not what I meant; I was just trying to relate my confusion and how I cannot envisage talk of 'experience' in a physical PZ when the correlate of that experience is a) a distributed physical brain state and b) in the physical world does not have a user illusion with any sense of unity... or sense of anything, full stop (if just talking about material interactions). If there's another way to talk about it, I'm all ears, but in that sense alone, I don't think I'll get much further in my thinking.