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I assume you're not counting Newtonian physics?
Not quite. Qualia debates are only gibberish if you are only looking at behavior. But qualia is posited to be experiential, not behavioral. Someone who acts like they have red qualia but doesn't and someone who does may have identical behavior (including whether they can talk about their having qualia!), but would differ in that one respect. I see no reason why this is incoherent.
This is just question begging; experiences are no more real than qualia, if they can't affect behavior by definition.
Not that they can't affect behavior, just that it's not necessary for them to affect behavior.
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First, see edits if you haven't, I've had some more thoughts on this.
Second, I'm using a pretty exacting definition of "rigorously imagine" that goes beyond things feeling true enough. The fact that I can "imagine" some goofy Rick and Morty style dimension, some narrative-driven crayonsverse, is not interesting. How does a universe work with only Newtonian physics? Subatomic scale doesn't work, astronomical objects don't work, nothing works. Newtonian physics is a sketch for a limited range of conditions, not the true generating algorithm of the kind that modern theoretical physics aspires to decipher. If the reality cannot be generated by its apparent generative algorithm, this is an incoherent reality. if you observe reality that can only be described by Newtonian physics, but you are anything like a human on anything like a planet in space, your best bet is that this is some simulation or that you're damn high and it's time to go back.
As our understanding progresses, we discover more and more of our ideas were not wrong but – not even wrong; inhoherent. This is, sadly, impossible to know in advance and, for most ideas, impossible to ever be 100% certain about (cue Descartes). That aside, we can safely presume that much of what we currently think is coherent will be revealed as anything but.
I define behavior as internal processing as well; it is made of behavior of cells and their elements, and again down to particle physics. A zombie is not just saying he sees red, like an LLM could – he looks at something actually red (assuming it's a zombie with healthy vision), the whole causal cascade that in a human corresponds to seeing and reporting red plays out, from retina to the tongue, it necessarily includes that pre-verbal neural computation which concludes "hmm yep, feels like seein' red alright". We can say that this part is "not really qualia of red" but it positively exists so long as we define zombie as a perfectly replicated human and it fits any definition of qualia that can be operationalized. It is not coherent to say that a zombie works like a human, behaves like a human, but that part is non-existent so being zombie "doesn't feel like anything" to itself.
Okay, yeah, if behavior extends to internal process, then that makes philosophical zombies much less likely—qualia would have to be the sort of thing that we could accidentally have, separate from our talking about it or interacting with it, which seems unlikely to be something we should think to be the case
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I consider myself very lucky to have you on my side on this matter, I consider it a strong signal that I'm on the side of truth and factual correctness, even when I struggle to rigorously express the intuitions I've built from following the field.
Not just any simulation, but a simulation that is almost certainly eliding the underlying details of how your consciousness is implemented there.
I'm sure Newtonian physics is Turing Complete, so I can see someone emulating a human brain within it, but that would be a very weird thing to do.
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