I believe he's trying to draw a distinction between two potential sources of evidence:

1. The factual claim that people believe zombies are conceivable, and
2. The actual private act of conceiving of zombies.

Richard is saying that his justification for his belief that p-zombies are conceivable lies in his successful conception of p-zombies. So what licenses him to believe that he's successfully conceived of zombies after all? His answer is that he has direct access to the contents of his conception, in the same way that he has access to the contents of his perception. You don't need to ask, "How do I know I'm really seeing blue right now, and not red?" Your justification for your belief that you're seeing blue just is your phenomenal act of noticing a real, bluish sensation. This justification is "direct" insofar as it comes directly from the sensation, and not via some intermediate process of reasoning which involve inferences (which can be valid or invalid) or premises (which can be true or false). Similarly, he thinks his justification for his belief that p-zombies are conceivable just is his p-zombie-ish conception.

A couple of things to note. One is that this evidence is wholly private. You don't have direct access to his conceptions, just as you don't have direct access to his perceptions. The only evidence Richard can give you is testimony. Moreover, he agrees that testimony of this sort is extremely weak evidence. But it's not the evidence he claims that his belief rests on. The evidence that Richard appeals to can be evidence-for-Richard only.

Another thing is that the direct evidence he appeals to is not "neutral." If p-zombies really are inconceivable, then he's in fact not conceiving of p-zombies at all, and so his conception, whatever it was, was never evidence for the conceivability of p-zombies in the first place (in just the same way that seeing red isn't evidence that you're seeing blue). So there's no easy way to set aside the question of whether Richard's conception is evidence-for-him from the question of whether p-zombies are in general conceivable. The worthiness of Richard's source of evidence is inextricable from the actual truth or falsehood of the claim in contention, viz., that p-zombies are conceivable. But he thinks this isn't a problem.

If you want to move ahead in the discussion, then the following are your options:

1. You simply deny that Richard is in fact conceiving of p-zombies. This isn't illegitimate, but it's going to be a conversation-stopper, since he'll insist that he does have them but that they're private.
2. You accept that Richard can successfully conceive of p-zombies, but that this isn't good evidence for their possibility (or that the very notion of "possibility" in this context is far too problematic to be useful).
3. You deny that we have direct access to anything, or that access to conceptions in particular is direct, or that one can ever have private knowledge. If you go this route, you have to be careful not to set yourself up for easy reductio. Specifically, you'd better not be led to deny the rationality of believing that you're seeing blue when, e.g., you highlight this text.

I hope this helps clear things up. It pains me when people interpret their own confusion as evidence of some deep flaw in academic philosophy.

If it helps (which I don't expect it does), I've been pursuing the trail of this (and related things) here.

Thus far his response seems to be that certain beliefs don't require evidence (or, at least, don't require "independent justification," which may not be the same thing), and that his beliefs about zombies "cohere well" with his other beliefs (though I'm not sure which beliefs they cohere well with, or whether they coheres better with them than their negation does), and that there's no reason to believe it's false (though it's not clear what role reasons for belief play in his decision-making in the first place).

Good point. I think my biggest frustration is that I can't tell what point Richard Chappell is actually making so I can know whether I agree with it. It's one thing to make a bad argument; it's quite another to have a devastating argument that you keep secret.

I don't follow: he's getting positive net karma from this discussion, just not as much as other posters. Very few of his comments, if any, actually went negative. In what sense in the karma system discouraging him?