When people talk about their consciousness, they communicate using things like their mouths and hands. Mouths and hands are physical.
Or do you belong to the school of "People talk about their consciousness not because of their consciousness, but from an entirely different chain of events that just happens to be accidentally correct"?
Within the structure of that argument, how is consciousness different from a pink elephant? I use a physical mouth to talk about a pink elephant; does the pink elephant therefore have classical physical effects that can be measured?
Not the OP, but consider the p-zombie world thought experiment: Chalmers would have us believe that we would still be having precisely this conversation about qualia, even if qualia were impossible in such a world, and no human had ever had a true subjective experience. The concept of qualia would still somehow have been invented and triggered precisely the same centuries of disagreement that we have seen.
This is as equally inconceivable as p-zombies are conceivable (to some), therefore I can only conclude that there is some fatal flaw in the p-zombie argument, and so I dismiss the conceivability of p-zombies. Thus, the presence of consciousness must somehow be behaviourally distinguishable.
> The burden of proof rests on those asserting that something is true.
That's nonsense. I'm sure you can re-write most if not all assertions that "something is false" as equivalent assertions that "something else is true," therefore the burden of proof rests equally on everyone asserting anything.
