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The idle-experience objection

If experience is a further fact that changes nothing in the course of things, it is not what makes you speak of it, and your very conviction becomes inexplicable.

Objects to Property dualism

Dennett · Consciousness Explained · 1991

1. This position grants the causal closure of the physical world, self-sufficient as it is: no neuron waits on experience to fire, and that is what allows it to call itself naturalistic.
2. It follows that experience is a mere epiphenomenon, doing nothing: my cries, my gestures, and even my words about my pain are explained without it, by the nervous machinery alone.
3. Yet I do speak of my experience, I marvel at it, I write books about the hard problem. Those behaviours therefore have, by the position's own lights, entirely physical causes.
4. My conviction that there is experience therefore does not come from experience: it would be exactly the same were there none, since the zombie, physically identical, also declares it has a feel and marvels at it.

Therefore Either experience acts, and the closure of the physical world must be given up; or it does not, and the testimony on which the whole position rests is cut off from what it testifies to.