Your notion of what constitutes a ‘phenomenal event’ is obviously somewhat different from mine, so I’d be interested in unpacking exactly what you mean by it.
For ‘most people’ their hand is what they perceive there at the end of their arm. In this sense the perceptual appearance of the hand, which is the phenomenal experience, simply is the hand. Again this is what is called naive realism in the philosophy of mind. So it makes ordinary sense to say that my hand is identical with this hand here at the end of my arm (waves hand). In this everyday sense the phenomenal hand is the physical hand.
But even for a dualist it is somewhat tortured grammar to state that ‘my hand is not a phenomenal event’, but I sort of get what you mean to say. Your perception of the hand is not the physical flesh and bone object that exists in your physical world that is somehow ‘external’ to that perception. That your hand exists even while you sleep is a good thing, and that would be a condition for the possibility of seeing it there at the end of your arm again when awake. But I still fail to see how this makes the physicality of your phenomenal hand ‘external’ to that hand.
I would say you push your dualist point too far, but in the end it’s a question of semantics. Effectively you have two of the same hand, at least from my perspective, the phenomenal hand and its physically ‘external’ flesh and bone hand.
It makes perfectly natural and ordinary language sense to say you have only the one hand though, and that your phenomenal hand just has physical properties associated with it, not that there are two of them, nor that the actual hand is physical and the perceived hand … I guess an unreal semblance? I also understand you wish to remain ‘agnostic’ by not actually saying anything about the phenomenal hand, although your dualism does explicitly extract it from the ‘real’ and ‘external’ physical world and that simply is your metaphysical position with regard to the reality of phenomena in relation to their physicality.
But what is it that you understand by the term ‘phenomenal experience’? In the hard problem of consciousness this experience is the immediate perceptual experience you might have when opening your eyes, you presumably have a field of vision and a phenomenal experience of seeing phenomenal things with phenomenal colours, shading and form. There is ‘something it is like to be DKervick’, existing within a totality of perceptual experiences that together make up your phenomenal world.
If DKervick was a philosophical zombie then when it opened its eyes it would not experience anything phenomenal, much like a robot is just a machine, or a rock is a mineral, or perhaps even a cabbage which while alive can hardly be said to be sentient. Zombie DKervick, who exists solely in your ‘external’ physical world until you observe it standing ‘there’, would however still react to the electromagnetic radiation that hits its eyeballs sending electrochemical signals cascading through its zombie brain that send signals to its muscles to respond, presumably appropriately, much like its non-zombie self.
Is this how you understand conscious i.e., phenomenal experience?
