practicing responding to the stranger who randomly joined our conversation at the bar
Yeah, so a philosophical zombie is somebody who behaves like a normal human, they can walk around and have a conversation and react normally to stuff, but they're not conscious. Which means something like, they don't have subjective experience. What is subjective experience? One way it's defined is being able to experience "qualia". Like, if you look at this brick wall, it's red. From a physical perspective you can analyze this as like, it looks red to you because it's light of a specific wavelength that travels into your eyes and activates cells that send neurotransmitters that signal other neurons in your brain and so on. But you probably have this feeling, this experience, of what it's like to see red that doesn't feel to you like it's "light of a specific wavelength", right? That experience is qualia, and it's part of a definition of consciousness, maybe.
There's an old thought experiment that John Locke came up with that was like, imagine that everything in the world that looked red to me looked green to you, and vice versa. Like, this wall that looks red to you, when I look at it, the experience that I have is the same experience you have when you look at something green. We'd still be able to communicate about the colors of things, and we wouldn't know the difference! Because it just means I would grow up learning that the word "R-E-D" refers to the experience that you have when you looking at something green, but to me, the things that that word describes are the same things that word describes to you.
Or there's a newer thought experiment by Frank Jackson that goes like, imagine you have this genius scientist who grows up in a completely black-and-white room, with black-and-white books and a black-and-white computer and everything, and learns everything you can learn from the written word about physics and neuroscience and all that, so she knows that apples reflect light of a specific wavelength and that humans who see that light will use the word "red". Then after all that she steps out of the room, and for the first time ever, she gets to see a red apple for herself. Does she learn anything new? Is this a new experience? Intuitively I feel like it would be! Which, if true, suggests there's something about seeing red that you can't quite reduce to knowledge you can write down and transfer between people through speech or writing or whatever; and that something is consciousness. Of course maybe my imagination just isn't good enough, and maybe if you really were a genius scientist you'd be able to figure out what it's like to see the color red from reading black-and-white books. I don't know. But that's what's so interesting. For now, with our current understanding of science, there's just no way to know if somebody else is conscious in the same way you are.
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What do you mean by energy? Do you mean just the physical concept? Because a falling rock has energy, or maybe an electric car. Are those things conscious? I think the philosophy that everything is conscious is called panpsychism, it's a real thing and there are days when I feel inclined towards it, but you have to realize that it's not exactly popular. Most people you pull off the street are not going to agree.
I don't have absolute conviction in any particular theory of consciousness, but yours doesn't seem to make any progress towards resolving the apparent impossibility of communicating subjective experience between two conscious beings. And even if you have an answer to whether philosophical zombies can exist, just to be clear, my friend was simply trying to invoke them as just a tongue-in-cheek metaphor for how his coworkers lack rich inner lives because they all have the same hobbies.
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I have to push back on the premise. What is a name except something we use to refer to each other? The government refers to me by one name. Everybody you'll meet at the bar who knows me refers to me by another. Why is the first one more real than the second? If anything, this name is more real to me because it's one I put thought and effort into choosing for myself, it's actually mine.
I like the philosophy that names are like gifts, right? Generally you should appreciate and respect gifts you receive, but there are times when you'll receive a gift and it turns out to not fit you or not to be what you need, and there's no shame in thoughtfully discarding it or giving it away.
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I'm going to head out now, have a good one.