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RobbBB comments on Zombies Redacted - Less Wrong
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This argument is not going to win over their heads and hearts. It's clearly written for a reductionist reader, who accepts concepts such as Occam's Razor and knowing-what-a-correct-theory-looks-like. But such a person would not have any problems with p-Zombies to begin with.
If you want to persuade someone who's been persuaded by Chalmers, you should debunk the argument itself, not bring it to your own epistemological ground where the argument is obviously absurd. Because you, and the Chalmers-supporter are not on the same epistemological ground, and will probably never be.
Here's how you would do that.
---- START ARGUMENT ----
Is it conceivable that the 5789312365453423234th digit of Pi is 7?
No, don't look it up just yet. Is it conceivable to you, right now, that it's 7?
For me, yes, it is. If I look it up, and it turns out to be 7, I would not be surprised at all. It's a perfectly reasonable outcome, with predictable consequences. It's not that hard for me to imagine me running a program that calculates and prints the number, and it printing out 7.
Yet, until you look it up, you don't really know if it's 7 or not. It could be 5. It would also be a reasonable, non-surprising and conceivable outcome.
Yet at least one of those outcomes is logically impossible. The exact value of Pi is logically determined, and, if you believe that purely logical conclusions apply universally, then one of those values of 5789312365453423234th digit of Pi is universally impossible.
And yet both are conceivable.
So logical impossibility does not imply inconceivability. This is logically equivalent to saying "conceivability does not imply logical possibility" (A->B => ~B->~A).
If conceivability does not imply logical possibility, then even if you can imagine a Zombie world, it does not mean that the Zombie world is logically possible. It may be the case that the Zombie world is logically impossible. Chalmer's argument does not rule that out. For example, it may be the case that certain atomic configurations necessarily imply consciousness. Or it may be any other case of logical impossibility. What matters is that consciousness as an additional nonphysical entity is not implied by its conceivability.
---- END ARGUMENT ----
I would suggest that people who have already studied this issue in depth would have other reasons for rejecting the above blog post. However, you are right that philosophers in general don't use Occam's Razor as a common tool and they don't seem to make assumptions about what a correct theory "looks like."
Chalmers does not claim that p-zombies are logically possible, he claims that they are metaphysically possible. Chalmers already believes that certain atomic configurations necessarily imply consciousness, by dint of psychophysical laws.
The claim that certain atomic configurations just are consciousness is what the physicalist claims, but that is what is contested by knowledge arguments: we can't really conceive of a way for consciousness to be identical with physical states.
Chalmers doesn't think 'metaphysical possibility' is a well-specified idea. He thinks p-zombies are logically possible, but that the purely physical facts in our world do not logically entail the phenomenal facts; the phenomenal facts are 'further facts.'