It seems at best fairly confused to say that an L-zombie is wrong because of something it would do if it were run, simply because we evaluated what it would say or do against the situation where it didn’t. Where you keep saying “is” and “concludes” and “being” you should be saying “would”, “would conclude”, and “would be”, all of which is a gloss for “would X if it were run”, and in the (counter-factual) world where the L-zombie “would” do those things it “would be running” and therefore “would be right”. Being careful with your tenses here will go a long way.
Nonetheless I think the concept of an L-zombie is useful, if only to point out that computation matters. I can write a simple program that encapsulates all possible L-zombies (or rather would express them all, if it were run), yet we wouldn’t consider that program to be those consciousnesses—a point well worth remembering in numerous examinations of the topic.
It seems at best fairly confused to say that an L-zombie is wrong because of something it would do if it were run, simply because we evaluated what it would say or do against the situation where it didn’t. Where you keep saying “is” and “concludes” and “being” you should be saying “would”, “would conclude”, and “would be”, all of which is a gloss for “would X if it were run”, and in the (counter-factual) world where the L-zombie “would” do those things it “would be running” and therefore “would be right”. Being careful with your tenses here will go a long way.
Nonetheless I think the concept of an L-zombie is useful, if only to point out that computation matters. I can write a simple program that encapsulates all possible L-zombies (or rather would express them all, if it were run), yet we wouldn’t consider that program to be those consciousnesses—a point well worth remembering in numerous examinations of the topic.