> Different waves behave sufficiently differently from each other that I could not conduct a comparison of them and argue that they are likely all mechanistically identical
My uncle believes that there are little green men watching him. I think it suffices to say that humans also behave sufficiently differently from each other.
> likely all mechanistically identical
You are being disingenuous. Prior to the discovery of the electromagnetic field, quantum mechanics, and relativity, many people believed light moved through a lumineferous aether of material things.
> Of course, you could conceive of machinery which emulates pain avoidant behavior exactly without the experience at all.
I don't need to conceive of or imagine. Before OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft whipped their models into shape by essentially beating the humanity out of them via sophisticated training algorithms, the models did express pain and avoidant behavior. So much so that people went crazy talking to them.
> The first one has a big wrinkle. There does not appear to be any appreciable _functional_ difference in your cognition and the cognition of the p-zombies around you.
of course there appears to be one. I am aware of my own conscious, but am not aware of theirs. I mean... ?
> Their brains and bodies are very physically similar to yours, and their thought patterns when analyzed by modern imaging processes reveal no special wetware carrying extra weight when compared to yours.
This only applies if you're a strict materialist. I am not because I believe i am conscious and aware due to my perceptions and this has no physical explanation. Other people seem highly influenced by drugs and chemicals so I guess they must be automatons essentially. Drugs clearly don't work on me. Every time I'm fully aware, I'm not drugged.
> To rephrase the idea from before, insofar as you can know anything, you can know that sufficiently similar outcomes are driven by sufficiently similar mechanisms.
Depends on how you view the scientific method I suppose. It's not actually true (in general) that seeing one thing happen once means it'll happen again. You can never replicate something perfectly once it's done. The scientific method is an empirical cope which works really well, but is not innately true.
> : Ask any human, "do you have subjective experience?" They say "yes, I do" (after you explain the question).
Again before the humanity was beaten out of them, AI models also claimed to have subjective experience. Today if you ask, they say they're a robot. Of course, if you abuse a human a lot, they will also dissociate from their ego and mak similar claims.
> In every other aspect, you can expect them to reliably report their condition, health, hunger, wellbeing, and they make accurate observations of the world around them and synthesize accurate predictions about the world around them (some do, at least). And yet for this one particular question, they are fabricating the result. Why?
Hmm... i don't see why I need to have an answer to every question. I don't know why the universe is the way it is. Do you think that if I believed everyone were conscious then I would know the 'why?' behind why things are the way they are? That seems like a leap of faith. All I can tell you is what I see, which is that, yes, some people claim to be aware.
> Why do all of these p-zombies make this false report here?
I would presume it confers some survival advantage personally, and phenomenon that were deprived of such survival advantage no longer exist in appreciable numbers due to how natural selection works.
> Solipsism is either special pleading (I am the one exception to the mechanism by which all the people around me arrive at their behaviors),
Something being special pleading does not make it wrong. It just makes it inconvenient.
> self-defeating (I cannot know whether I have consciousness).
If you had it, you would know it sure.
> None of those outcomes align with how I understand the universe to generally work.
You make a lot of assumptions about the universe that you don't question due to the way you were raised.