Strong emergence is wrong because it violates natural laws.
Weak emergence is correct but can’t explain higher level phenomena such as p-consciousness.
Chalmers himself doesn’t say this:
http://www.consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf
Strong emergence has much more radical consequences than weak emergence. If there are phenomena that are strongly emergent with respect to the domain of physics, then our conception of nature needs to be expanded to accommodate them. That is, if there are phenomena whose existence is not deducible from the facts about the exact distribution of particles and fields throughout space and time (along with the laws of physics), then this suggests that new fundamental laws of nature are needed to explain these phenomena.
Followed by:
We have seen that strong emergence, if it exists, has radical consequences. The question that immediately arises, then, is: are there strongly emergent phenomena?
My own view is that the answer to this question is yes. I think there is exactly one clear case of a strongly emergent phenomenon, and that is the phenomenon of consciousness. We can say that a system is conscious when there is something it is like to be that system; that is, when there is something it feels like from the system’s own perspective. It is a key fact about nature that it contains conscious systems; I am one such. And there is reason to believe that the facts about consciousness are not deducible from any number of physical facts.
I think people forget the entire point of the p-zombie thought experiment was merely to outline that it is LOGICALLY possible to think of a being acting like we do without having to have consciousness. We can even imagine some kind of feline creature that can dive to the depths of the ocean. What we CANNOT imagine is a square circle because it contradicts LOGIC.
Not having experienced an aquatic cat or a philosophical zombie isn’t the same as them being possible. The issue is ‘logic’.
If you’re looking to define ‘phenomenal consciousness’ with greater precision then taking into account the logical application of thoughts is paramount to this.
Phenomenal consciousness operates specifically within the limits of what is logically thinkable. An obvious example where our logical knowledge seems unsatisfactory when relating experience to rationality is in the quantum perspective. This is indicative of our ignorance is nothing else.
The whole translation of this problem - as far as I can tell - is due to the conflict between experience and logical knowledge. What may be logically sound doesn’t often coincide with experience.
Note: I’m certainly NOT saying that quantum physics is anything but robust and logical!
Other argumentation against Chalmers’ view is often - and blithely - dismissed as equivalent to ‘I don’t know, so god did it!’ Ironically the people saying such things are the ignorant ones because they take his words as religious proclamations rather than as questions meant to probe into our ignorance rather than ignore it’s existence and behave in an arrogant manner. People forget no one can ‘imagine’ a ‘god’. What cannot be logically held in the mind cannot possibly exist within the mind (just like ‘square circles’ or talk of ‘purple weight silently screaming to trouser dreams‘). The fact that we can imagine a philosophical zombie begs the question as to what is it that makes us ‘conscious entity’ rather than a ‘zombie entity’?
Is that useful? Would a definition of ‘phenomenal consciousness’ benefit from an approach based mostly around what is logically possible in our head rather than what can merely be stated. It seems so to me, but this isn’t of much interest to me as it is to you I suspect.