No reason - but seeing isn't quite as puzzling as the 'Hard Problem'...
No... there is a reason why we cant speculate about such a being: without sight they have no way to function in the world if theyre acting like sighted people in every respect.
I tend to agree, but that doesn't stop one conceiving of such a world - it's just not a particularly useful or interesting stimulus for considering the hows and whys of vision because we broadly know how vision works... unless you allow something like sonar clicking, which could conceivably allow a blind person to behave indistinguishably from a short-sighted monochromat... (except in high-noise environments!)
You don't need consciousness to use a map of your self that identifies and distinguishes you within some environment - the Mars rover has a map of itself and its physical extent in relation to its surroundings that it uses to avoid unintended contact when moving autonomously (navigation, sampling/camera arm, etc); I suspect the same is true of some self-driving cars.
I think that's the point of such thought experiments. Some are more interesting than others.
I think you might be underrating the depth of the self mapping that we humans do - and need to do. The self driving car version is utterly rudimentary. Humans need spatial self mapping way beyond where cars are at. But not just that, we also do elaborate social self mapping. I've heard that this in fact my point to the origin of self consciousness. My suggestion is that the p-zombie cannot behave "just like us" without this capacity.
I agree - I was just querying your apparent equating of self-mapping with self-consciousness ("Without a map of themselves that they can identify with (self consciousness) how can the p-zombie go about the world properly?"). On reflection, you probably didn't mean it that way...
I agree; it seems to be the same kind of problem as Searle's Chinese Room - he claims that even though the responses from the room comprehensively pass the Turing test for a Chinese speaker, there's no understanding of Chinese in the room - to which my question would be 'what do we mean by understanding, if not that?'. It doesn't seem qualitatively different from what we do with our vast computational resource of neurons and stored information.
Actually I did propose self consciousness as the human result of deep physical, social, etc self mapping. Its not my idea. But it seems plausible. Not sure if it necessarily follows tho. But if it does, then the p-zombie case is totally mis leading.
It's certainly plausible, but - as you say - in a deeper, richer way, with many more aspects than simply mapping self vs the environment. A degree of recursion is involved (one can introspect oneself observing oneself observing oneself); Douglas Hofstadter made this point in 'I Am A Strange Loop', and some of the neurological mappings are described in Antonio Damasio's 'Self Comes To Mind'.
I see it as just an intuition pump (presented by someone who believes there is a Hard Problem) and I suspect that the apparent incoherence of p-zombies may well imply something about the coherence of the Hard Problem itself...
