I find it likely you will never read this, or probably anyone else on this very old thread, but I will give a statement that you may like, since I believe you are actually correct at framing this issue:
Firstly, I think zombies are unavoidable unless you are a flat-out dualist. And that Chalmers framing this thing called the Hard Problem, was a way of his own question being answered. That also means you can't really say the Hard Problem is answerable from his framing either with zombies being the true point in it. It's already set up for failure via a category error on its own from someone who is basically using this to get a circular argument out of someone who didn't understand the logic to begin with. SO if you are not just a dualist, you can create this problem for any ideology. Which is basically silly and you can say that any non-physicalism would also have a zombie effect counterpart unanswerable not based on reductive problems but on still a conceptual ground. Which is a problem with conceptual arguments.
Secondly, Penrose is not a dualist. He is basically a physicalist but his view from his book Shadows Of The Mind he refers to it as Three Worlds based on a Platonic version of Karl Popper's metaphysics. However, his is not dualism, and his version of the quantum state reduction positions the reduction inside of a physical world using a version of gravity and quantum oscillators that randomize incomputable events, so it is basically still a physicalist view of consciousness. His view does not even take into consideration the Hard Problem as I understand it and never mentions it. And by the end of his book the idea itself was unfinished. Whether or not this is coherent enough to be truly tested or understood as a theory on the other hand is something else. (which is only considered by some physicalists) The confusion over dualism I think stems from the fact that everyone basically seems to not understand the idea of it or never read the book fully and how confusing it is. And Hameroff, who he was working with on this also referred to his idea as an "identity theory" of consciousness. Which has perhaps become the confusion between Hameroff and Penrose's statements.
I find it likely you will never read this, or probably anyone else on this very old thread, but I will give a statement that you may like, since I believe you are actually correct at framing this issue:
Firstly, I think zombies are unavoidable unless you are a flat-out dualist. And that Chalmers framing this thing called the Hard Problem, was a way of his own question being answered. That also means you can't really say the Hard Problem is answerable from his framing either with zombies being the true point in it. It's already set up for failure via a category error on its own from someone who is basically using this to get a circular argument out of someone who didn't understand the logic to begin with. SO if you are not just a dualist, you can create this problem for any ideology. Which is basically silly and you can say that any non-physicalism would also have a zombie effect counterpart unanswerable not based on reductive problems but on still a conceptual ground. Which is a problem with conceptual arguments.
Secondly, Penrose is not a dualist. He is basically a physicalist but his view from his book Shadows Of The Mind he refers to it as Three Worlds based on a Platonic version of Karl Popper's metaphysics. However, his is not dualism, and his version of the quantum state reduction positions the reduction inside of a physical world using a version of gravity and quantum oscillators that randomize incomputable events, so it is basically still a physicalist view of consciousness. His view does not even take into consideration the Hard Problem as I understand it and never mentions it. And by the end of his book the idea itself was unfinished. Whether or not this is coherent enough to be truly tested or understood as a theory on the other hand is something else. (which is only considered by some physicalists) The confusion over dualism I think stems from the fact that everyone basically seems to not understand the idea of it or never read the book fully and how confusing it is. And Hameroff, who he was working with on this also referred to his idea as an "identity theory" of consciousness. Which has perhaps become the confusion between Hameroff and Penrose's statements.