Again, that’s what the argument is for: all of those physical processes are perfectly consistent with no conscious experience existing (read: those processes occurring without any conscious experience, just as all other physical processes do, entails no logical contradiction), hence, nothing in there necessitates consciousness. “Something unknown might be doing we don’t know what” isn’t really an argument.
These are inconsistent statements. If you think the logic of the thought experiment is sound, then consciousness is not a manifestation of the physical interactions, because those fail to determine whether there is any conscious experience present, much less what form it ought to take.
But there is no difference to an electron absorbing a photon whether it does so in the vacuum of space, or within all the complicated machinery of the human body. If it can occur without conscious experience in the former case, then so too in the latter. It doesn’t ‘know’ that it is part of some ‘parts moving around’; the physics of quantum field theory is dynamically local, i.e. every interaction takes part at some infinitesimal volume and nothing outside that volume determines its outcome (this isn’t touched by either the Bell or the Reeh-Schlieder theorem).
If you’re then adamant that there is still some difference in whether those interactions take place in vacuum or within a body, then you’re saying that there is a qualitative difference irreducible to the properties of the component parts that somehow appears when they are put into the right configuration. That’s a notion known as strong emergence, and I’ve just been discussing it here, so I won’t repeat myself. Suffice it to say that to me, it’s basically magic, and will take you out of a physicalist position anyhow: there need to be ‘further facts’ irreducible to the physical facts that fix the emergence of facts relating to conscious experience.
I’ve given my response to the argument several times in this thread, and posted a link to the paper where I go into detail a couple of times now. Since posting the same link too often makes Discourse cry, here’s a link to a popular-level discussion of my basic model:
In brief, I attack the conceivability → possibility link of the argument: zombies are conceivable, but not metaphysically possible. This is a fine (and to many, costly) line to tread: essentially, I argue that all third-personal knowledge is embodied in models of one kind or another, with only structural relations of the object modeled present in the model. Thus, intrinsic properties are necessarily absent, but it is those that are ultimately responsible for conscious experience. Hence, conscious experience and its absence seem consistent with our knowledge, but only its presence is also possible.
This entails that the hard problem is conceptually unsolvable, because it simply isn’t possible to find a model that encompasses it. It also means that I’m a different sort of physicalist than most others: while I think that the world is solely exhausted by physical properties, I don’t believe it can be completely subject to physical science. Whether this seems like an attractive position is up to anyone, but to me, it seemed the only way to rescue a physicalist commitment.
But again, that’s a practical, not a fundamental problem. The problem with conscious experience is a fundamental one.
Again, I think it’s in fact conceptually impossible: your experience is locked in your being that entity that has that experience; to imagine another’s experience (rock or otherwise) is just to fool yourself into believing that you could imagine what it’s like to be that other, but in fact, you’re just experiencing what it’s like to be you having a certain set of thoughts—your thoughts, not the rock’s (or whom/whatever’s).
If they exist, then there is no complete physical explanation of consciousness, much less a physical cause; so denying their relevance would be to embark on a fool’s errant in trying to find such things.