Hey nice topic here. The problem of philosophical zombies is a pretty strange one, and quite relevant as I'm currently writing an essay on mental causation.
Basically, I think the main proponent of the philosophical zombie is David Chalmers... although it has a lot to do with other phenomenalists such as Nagel etc.
The phenomenalist position is basically a nonreductive physicalist position. They hold that mental states are not fully reducible to physical states. In the area of consciousness, they hold that consciousness is not equal to the physical neural states that realise consciousness. In other words, phenomenalists hold that, in addition to our brains and all the events of synapses firing, there is some other thing going on when we are consciousness. This other thing is not physical, and is called by many different names: 'epiphenomena,' 'qualia' or 'what it is like.'
This new phenomenalist position centres around Thomas Nagel's influential paper What it is Like to Be a Bat. He argues that we could investigate everything about a bat's brain, and how it uses sonar to navigate, but we would never be able to experience what it is like to be a bat, and that this aspect will continually elude our scientific endeavours. A similar argument is made for things such as seeing red: we can investigate pigments, light and the eye, but we will never be able to explain the 'qualia' of the conscious feeling of seeing red.
Epiphenomenalism is a type of phenomenalism. Epiphenomena are produced by the physical world, somehow supervene on it, but do not have any causal powers of their own. Think of your shadow - it is produced by you, it mimics your physical actions, it follows you around, but it cannot reach and grab objects. The problem with epiphenomenalism is that it is unneccessary - if the phenomena has no causal power, and the world can get on by fine without it, why posit it?
The philosophical zombie is basically a thought experiment that seeks to drive the intuition that it is possible to have a physical replica of a human being, but that replica has no conscious experience, and so therefore conscious states are not equal to their physical states.
Problems: there are many problems with phenomenalism. The main problem comes from its antireductive nature, and the fact that it is basically a form of dualism, which goes against the current recieved view of physicalism. Another problem with the zombie thought experiment is that it doesn't really seem to be that intuitively plausible. At least, not to me anyway. Also, it voilates a thesis held by many philosophers, even those who in part agree with phenomenalism's nonreductivism: the thesis of supervenience. This thesis holds that if one were to build an atom-by-atom replica of a person, once the physical building process is complete, there is no more work to be done in order to duplicate the mental states or the consciousness.
I'm not sure whether the philosophical zombie is meant to be an atom by atom replica of a human, or simply a sort of composite 'artificial' person, like a robot or something. If it is the former case, it would violate supervenience, and if it is the latter I don't see how any meaningful intuition could be drawn from it.
So, my answer to how to tell if it were a zombie would be this: it is not possible for such a zombie to exist in the first place. If a zombie is complex enough to be able to properly respond to conversation with me, then it has consciousness and is not a 'zombie.' For it to have no real 'consciousness' it would have to be as dumb as, say, a rock: you increase the intelligence of an organism and you increase the complexity of its consciousness, which is why chimps appear so fascinating.
Basically this is a version of the Turing test for artificial intelligence, whereby if a computer is able to trick a human into thinking it is talking with another human, then it is genuinely intelligent.
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