Hi,

This seems to me to be a distinction without a difference. 

David’s statement surely implies that two characteristics of a zombie (hypothetical or not) are that it would be ‘physically identical to a normal human being’ but that ‘all is dark inside’. That, surely, is to give a description of what a zombie ‘is like’ – or at least the beginnings of one. Your comment that ‘The phrase was just meant to restate that a zombie has no consciousness’ is surely just another way of attempting to do the same thing.

Moreover, if as you say ‘Whether a zombie is possible or not is a major controversy in philosophy of mind,’ then surely you would need a description (definition) of one? Otherwise how would we know what we are even talking about?

All this is quite interesting, I think, because one of the reasons I usually find discussions of consciousness in analytic philosophy so unconvincing is precisely that the descriptions of what consciousness might mean are typically so very meagre and superficial. Ditto, unsurprisingly, for descriptions of zombiehood – which, I gather, is posited as sort of ‘reverse’ of consciousness. The suggestion that zombiehood is a state in which ‘all is dark inside’ presumably implies that consciousness, by contrast, is a state in which ‘all is light inside’ – merely a vague metaphor which tells us nothing of any substance about what human consciousness might consist in.