P-zombies is a thought experiment to demonstrate the hard problem of consciousness, it is not, in itself, an argument against materialism. I can certainly imag

P-zombies is a thought experiment to demonstrate the hard problem of consciousness, it is not, in itself, an argument against materialism. I can certainly imagine a robot that imitates all of human behaviors. If you hit it, it goes "Ow" and retracts, if you ask it if its conscious it says "yes". We can this imagine being created out of our completely physical electrical components, so the question becomes what is the difference between the imitation of consciousness and the consciousness we experience? This is interesting as in this day and age, we can totally imagine building such a robot, yet we'd have a tough time believing it is actually conscious. Now, whether you are a materialist or not depends entirely on whether or not you believe conscious experience like yours can emerge out of physical components. My take on this is: Materialism/physicalism is ill defined and materialism/physicalism and dualism are compatible. We consider completely mysterious properties like energy and now even randomness (things happen one way or another for no reason) as being fundamental physical facts about the universe. Theoretically, how does this differ from saying consciousness is a fundamental physical property? Moreover, you have to consider the fact that the "material" world IS an imagination of the mind. Whatever facts or attributes we assign to being material is limited to the mental facilities of the brain. At the end of the day, the question is, what fundamental facts do we need to explain the observations that we make? I can observe that I feel, see, hear things. Can the fundamental facts of the current physics model explain this? No? Then we must add to it an additional property, making it part of the standard physics model. If you want proof, you must either A. explain how consciousness can emerge out of existing known "material" processes, B. Admit consciousness as a "material" property and define the process by which it combines, reduces, etc. (the combination problem of panpsychism)