What if the background stuff that you neglect from your model is where all the interesting stuff happens?
Some people see the philosophical zombie as an argument against consciousness being material at all. I don't really see that, but I do see it as an argument against the idea that you can achieve sentience by emulating a coarse-grained approximation of the brain. I think you would have to either really totally understand the brain or harness evolution and let it build you a sentient being whose structure captures the essence of organic life within whatever its embodiment happens to be. You might end up with something that looks nothing like the brain superficially, but that embodies what the brain does somehow.
It sounds like I'm making a new-agey argument against reductionism, but I'm not. What I'm arguing against is overzealous reductionism... the idea that you can get a grainy image of something and quantize it and you're done. You might be able to do that in some areas, but in biology you can't get away with that. Very small causes can be just as important or more important in living systems than very large ones.
To avoid the philosophical zombie problem, I think at the very least we need a solid theoretical understanding of the phenomenon that we are trying to capture. We have to know what we are trying to do, otherwise we do not know how to start to go about doing it or whether we have done it or not. If you want to land on the moon you need to know what the moon is, where it is, and where you are in relation to it.
That means that we need:
1) A quantitative, hard, solid definition of life. Right now what we have is a qualitative phenomenological definition of life as it exists on Earth. I'm imagining a definition of life that's as solid as the thermodynamic definition of entropy or enthalpy. Based on what I've read in this area already, I would say that it's almost certain that a definition of life will be stated in terms of thermodynamics. Google Ilya Prigogine and dissipative structures to get started.
2) A definition of some sort for consciousness. Right now we have basically nothing here... not even a qualitative set of criteria like we have for life. We know that we are conscious, and we suspect that at least some other living things are conscious. We do not know whether all living things are conscious or not. We do not know whether the set of all conscious entities is entirely contained within the set of all living entities or whether something could be conscious but not alive.
IMHO dismissing #2 is chickening out. Dismissing #1 is definitely chickening out. Not answering the questions means you don't know where the moon is and you might be landing in New Mexico instead.
What if the background stuff that you neglect from your model is where all the interesting stuff happens?
Some people see the philosophical zombie as an argument against consciousness being material at all. I don't really see that, but I do see it as an argument against the idea that you can achieve sentience by emulating a coarse-grained approximation of the brain. I think you would have to either really totally understand the brain or harness evolution and let it build you a sentient being whose structure captures the essence of organic life within whatever its embodiment happens to be. You might end up with something that looks nothing like the brain superficially, but that embodies what the brain does somehow.