Suppose I decide to raise arm. I do so and the arm is raised. But how is that even possible? How can the mental event of intending to move one's arm cause the physical event of the arm raising up? Are not all physical events only caused by preceding physical events? (causal closure). Whence this assumption that we can mentally cause physical events to happen? And can we live our lives without assuming they do?
Since a philosophical zombie sports a similar "will" or issues commands to its limbs (all mechanism and no inner appearances), one would have to resort to experiential content alone causing the body to do something, in order to potentially pose a problem.
Like a person speaking or writing about the green of spring leaves, the odor of blossoms, the taste of garlic, the sharp pain of a thorn pressing against the skin and so forth. Note that this would refer to the manifestations themselves or the "phenomenal meaning" of such terms -- and not scientific descriptions of color as EM frequencies, odor as chemical composition, etc.
One could get around the causality of qualia -- of brain activity being affected by them so that it has knowledge of them -- by proclaiming that there are neural correlates in the brain devoted to maintaining the fiction or pretense that electrochemical processes possess such intrinsic states (that are publicly inaccessible). Evolution introduced these personal myths for some functional or beneficiary reason.
However, apart from the most extreme devotees of eliminativism or illusionism, it would seem a far-fetched conspiracy attributed to biological processes, that we would all be so well coordinated in our beliefs about non-existent, private phantasms.
And then there's the introspective fact that we can each verify those qualitative properties as presenting themselves. Again, only the most dogmatic or demented extreme phenomenal nihilists would be in denial of the manifestations of color, sound, etc blatantly showing themselves in their own consciousness.
Of course, in my view... Primitive, intrinsic states would exist prior to brain organization or the emergence of a psychological level (and be ontological rather than mental or psychological). But the regular crowd would construe them as mental events even at the most base stratum, and thereby why they entertain panpsychism.
Lee Smolin:
The problem of consciousness is an aspect of the question of what the world really is. We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties. Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence; it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations. Consciousness[1] whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains. --
Time Reborn
- - - footnote - - -
[1] The phenomenal manifestations alone, actually -- not cognitive abilities like identification, understanding, intelligence, memory recall. Consciousness is an umbrella term, and using its generality merely obfuscates the item or area of interest which one is narrowly addressing.
_