While I don't have too much experience to back this up, I think it is probably a lot of things I'm familiar with, elaborated at length, with perhaps a few insights sprinkled in.

Yes, I don't particularly like the way the sequences are written either :/ But I think the kind of thing you're talking about in this post is the sort of topic they address. LW Wiki pages are often better, e.g. see this one:

if a p-zombie is atom-by-atom identical to a human being in our universe, then our speech can be explained by the same mechanisms as the zombie's, and yet it would seem awfully peculiar that our words and actions would have one entirely materialistic explanation, but also, furthermore, our universe happens to contain exactly the right bridging law such that our experiences are meaningful and our consciousness syncs up with what our merely physical bodies do. It's too much of a stretch: Occam's razor dictates that we favor a monistic universe with one uniform set of laws.

I see this as compatible with my reply to skeptical_lurker above.

My point is: how do you evaluate if something has preferences? How do you disambiguate preferences from statements like "I prefer __"? Clearly we DO distinguish between these.

Agreed. I don't have any easy answer to this question. It's kind of like asking the question "if someone is ill or injured, how do you fix them?" It's an important question worthy of extensive study (at least insofar as it's relevant to whatever ethical question you're currently being presented with).

And it's possible that you and I would disagree on how to carve reality in to that which has preferences we consider meaningful vs that which doesn't. Occam's Razor only applies to the territory, not the map, so there's no penalty for us drawing our boundaries in as complicated & intricate a way as we like (kind of like the human-drawn country boundaries on real maps).