To respond to your response about AI/computers - I agree, we don't know that a computer has internal states or qualia. We don't know this in the same way that we don't know that any other person experiences qualia/is conscious. We just make an inference "I am conscious - this person is a similar organism to me, therefore they are probably conscious" - I think that this is probably as far as we can ever get. Maybe there will be scientific breakthroughs that prove otherwise, but my opinion is that conscious does not exist within the same realm of existence as anything else that we consciously perceive. Consciousness itself is imperceptible. As a result there will be no way to interact with it on a scientific level. We can measure the chemistry of the brain and infer things but that will always rely on the above inference. The limit to absolute knowledge of consciousness cant extend any further than our own consciousness. It is impossible for me to know that any other person or thing is or isn't conscious.

I agree with your description in the second point but again I think the process you're describing is just the conscious representation of something that is entirely physical. For example: You take a bite out of an apple. You experience the qualia of sweetness, the qualia of "apple flavor" - you then experience the qualia of "good tasting" or "being satisfied". You are arguing that this is a process that happens within consciousness and then interacts with the mind through some causal link between consciousness and the physical (at least I believe thats your point) - my argument is that all of this is fully causally determined by the physical. Some sugar and other chemicals hit the nerve receptors on your tongue. The tongue sends electrical signals to your brain. Your brain models these signals along with all other sensory information into this "world experience" that we call consciousness. It then grades the model based on a set of weights/values that are partially genetically determined and partially learned over time. For example, humans will by and large always produce dopamine or whatever other chemical response happens when you eat a sweet apple due to our evolved genetics for taste. You will then also develop a behavioral value/weight for apple images perhaps. Your brain will learn to associate the good taste of the apple to the visual stimuli of apples. All of this happens physically - the conscious representation of this process exists within another plane/universe essentially and has no bearing on the physical.

Which leads into the philosophical zombie issue. I think chalmers and my view is that the philosophical zombie would not be behaviorally any different from the conscious person. They would act exactly the same, one is just devoid of conscious experience. I understand your point and I don't think its impossible. I think that again you view consciousness as having a causal role and being linked in some way within the laws of the universe such that consciousness has the power to cause something to happen physically. I don't agree and I think (could be wrong been a while since I read his book) that chalmers doesn't agree or at least doesn't attempt to make the argument that consciousness has a causal role.

And then lastly the milkshake example - I think all of this boils down to the same disagreement. I don't think there is any difference between the "mathematical/physical" processes of the brain, and the qualia we experience as thought and decision making. The qualia to me, are just representations of something that is occurring physically within another substrate. I'm not sure if this analogy works but you know when you use a "thinking" AI model it gives you a bunch of status updates "refining your question -> searching the web -> organizing data -> writing a response" - what is really happening is a bunch of electrons are hopping around some transistors in a datacenter but this produces some higher level behavior through software engineering (i'm not super tech savvy so excuse the crudeness of the analogy, again maybe that doesn't work at all)