[fylham]

The hard problem of consciousness wonders why we seem to have consciousness when we could instead be input/output automata. You could imagine such a ‘zombie’ with our same social, emotional, and intellectual behavior (even pretending to have inner experiences) that doesn’t actually have Qualia. The existence of consciousness is not clearly causal, which is part of the mystery of why we seem to have it.

[layer8]

It doesn't seem plausible for something to have same social, emotional, and intellectual behavior without experiencing "qualia", because much of our behavior is expressing and talking about those experiences. I see "qualia" just as a second-order perception of the sensory-information processing within our brains. A little like a program profiler profiling its own process would observe parts of its own execution and process that information. I see no particular mystery in such an inner self-perception. At the same time, given what influences human behavior, it is an essential part for explaining that behavior. Philosophical zombies are an impossibility.