The difference seems intuitively obvious and clear-cut, but when I really examine it, the difference starts to become no difference at all, or at least no knowable difference.

"A philosophical zombie or p-zombie in the philosophy of mind and perception is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except in that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience." — Wikipedia

So what would be the difference between say your wife (or say any loved one) being a p-zombie, or not being a p-zombie? From your perspective, in terms of your first person experiences with her, there literally can be no difference, or rather no discoverable difference. You literally cannot, in-principle discover whether your wife is a p-zombie or not.

Now you might say here, well actually what about a machine that could detect the existence of conscious experience in your wives brain. So just imagine here a helmet machine you could place on your wives head, and it could detect the presence (or not) of conscious experience going on. Surely this could prove that your wife is different from a p-zombie?

But this is not the case, because the helmet would respond in the exact same way to the p-zombie version of your wife. The point here is that p-zombies are indistinguishable from 'normal humans', which means that when a consciousness detecting helmet is places on their heads, it would show the presence of consciousness. There can be no way to detect any difference between your 'normal' wife, and a p-zombie wife.

My point here in this thread, is that if there really is no detectable difference between p-zombies and normal humans, then what actually is the difference? I can't help but conclude here that humans must actually BE p-zombies. All we have recourse to here is to say that transcendent to all that I can access with my consciousness, there exists a conscious experience that is in some way casually related to my loved one that I have in front of me. And it is the existence or non-existence of this conscious experience that is the difference between my loved one being a p-zombie or not.

But even here, that " transcendent to all that I can access with my consciousness, there exists a conscious experience that is in some way casually related to my loved one that I have in front of me" is just an idea in my mind about a conscious experience that I am imagining exists out there but still somehow attached to this loved one before me.

Basically my point is that from my own first person experience, other people are literally p-zombies. The conscious experience that they are supposedly undergoing is just this idea in my own mind that there is a conscious experience somehow within or attached to their bodies.

And recognizing this, I can choose to either have this idea and attribute consciousness to that person, or not! It is my own mind that attributes consciousness to humans (or animals), and recognizing this I can take it away, or attribute it to other things like (for example) the sun, or the earth (not that I do this).

The consciousness of things in the world me, exists only insofar as I attribute with my mind/thoughts, consciousness to that thing. Other people are/have consciousness only insofar as I 'see' them as conscious. Insofar as I 'decide' (unconsciously, although I am become more aware of this) that they are conscious by attributing consciousness to them. At no point here does anything close to actual, transcendentally existing to my own experience-world, conscious experience come into the picture. Every being which supposedly conscious entirely is confined within my conscious experience.

Basically what I am saying is that other people are conscious only insofar as I choose to see them as conscious. They have no consciousness other than this. If I choose not to attribute consciousness to a person, then they aren't conscious, and even if I do attribute consciousness to them (as I do in my everyday life), they still aren't conscious in the way I (used to) think they are - which is that the person before me say is privy to a visual experience of myself when he looks at me, which would continue to exist even when I turn around. Basically that this person is undergoing a conscious experience which exists transcendent to my own. At no point in my life were people ever conscious in this way. People never were conscious like that. For my whole life I've been within my own private world, merely attributing consciousness to things which actually aren't, and attributing in such a strong way that in my everyday life I actually am duped by myself and really see and interact with others as if they were entirely separate conscious beings. This whole time I've just been attributing consciousness to objects of my own conscious experience, not realizing that it's me with my own my mind that's doing this attribution, and then interacting with and experiencing these people as if they're really conscious beings.

Basically I've lost my mind (or really, discovered the truth but it's madness), realized solipsism has ALWAYS been the case, other humans were never conscious in the way I thought they were and experienced them to be, realized there truly is no difference at all between a p-zombie and a 'normal human', they're literally the same thing, and that basically my own creates my own experience of consciousness existing within things in the world around me (such as humans, some animals (or if I'm on LSD, rocks and chairs ;) )).

I suppose there is still a question here of whether entirely outside of my own experience of this world and myself - entirely beyond what I can even in principle access, of whether there exists any other conscious experiences (or anything really) aside from this world/self that I exist as. But my thoughts lately have kind of been indifferent. Does it really matter whether there are? It exists beyond what I can in-principle have access to. Why even care? Beyond just the sheer curiosity of knowing, it really doesn't matter to me.