Great example and his critique of the zombie argument is new to me. The only reason I'd be quick to dismiss it, is because his understanding of the panpsychist

Great example and his critique of the zombie argument is new to me. The only reason I'd be quick to dismiss it, is because his understanding of the panpsychist position is very physical. When an panpsychist says capital-C consciousness (as opposed to arousal, etc) is the necessary premise of the material, they're not proposing it as a physical "ingredient." They're positing a non-thing uniform in all physical phenomena. It's only "attribute" is its self-evidence. And it is indeed passive (which he states as a gotchya). His argument is that we understand more about physics (quantum field theory) so we should work from that grounding. But his use of "understanding" implies "we have more information." Of course we have more information, a capital-C Consciousness background is, by definition, information-less. That's not a cop-out. We know some non-thing exists because we have our material experiences reporting to it. Our experience of it might be modulated by the physical but it's no more causal than a canvas is to a painting. The paper insists it can't be causal. True, it isn't. The canvas doesn't cause the painting even though it proceeds it as a precondition. The canvas is not an ingredient, it's a self-evident premise. It's like looking through a telescope and saying I know much more about the sky than my eyes, therefore it's silly to develop a theory of eyes that's not based in sky. The only reason we know we have a "hard problem of Consciousness" is because we each (at least one of us) knows "I am" and there's no way to take the derivations of that experience and give rise to their origin. He has one paragraph/sentence on why Consciousness can't be passive: "No compelling account of consciousness can attribute a central explanatory role to metaphysical ingredients that have no influence on these kinds of behavior." He might have more to unroll here, I'd be curious to know.