Hi Tim

First, I am very wary about any approach that talks in terms of different kinds of consciousness. I note in the little I've read in this area that there is a strong tendency to do this, but it seems to me to be premature, to say the least. If the very idea of consciousness is extremely elusive - which it is - one is surely jumping the gun to start splitting it up into different categories. So phrases like 'consciousness in a very broad sense' or  'experential aspects of consciousness', or 'qualitative aspect of consciousness', and 'consciousness in the "ordinary" sense', seem to me to raise more questions than they purport to answer. 

So where the zombie problem in particular is concerned, you can see that I would have a big problem in saying that 'it's the qualitative aspect of consciousness that's absent.'  If the very notion of consciousness - in any form - eludes us, I am not reassured at all by the thought that we are only talking about 'part' of it.  Essentially my objection to the notion of a zombie is very simple: if we can't say what consciousness is, how can we ever say what a being minus consciousness would be like? That seems to me to be simple logic.

That aside, yes I have huge problems with the Nagel "what it's like" formula, whether we call that "ordinary" usage or whatever we call it.  I do not think it captures anything important about consciousness. I gave one of my reasons in my last.  The other is that it seems to me to conceal a key element which is highly question-begging.  'What it's like' means in effect 'What it feels like'.  And once one starts relying on ideas like 'feel', 'experience' etc in descriptions/definitions of what consciousness might be, things get very dicey.  Can one 'feel like' anything if one is not a conscious being?  Can one experience anything if one is not a conscious being? So we are surreptitiously using the very notion of consciousness to define consciousness (or a form of it if you wish to split it into categories).

I hope this is clearer? 
 
(All this is, I realize, rank heresy in your field. But heretics can have their uses...)
 
DA.