Just to clarify, by consciousness I mean awareness in all forms, not just self-awareness. What I said still applies to self-awareness as well as to awareness in general, but I thought I would make explicit that I'm not just talking about the sense of being a self.

Ah, so we're arguing over definitions.

The immediate problem with physicalism is that reality contains qualia and physicalism doesn't. In a reformed physicalism that does contain qualia, they would have causal power.

Let's say you take an organism capable of receiving and interpreting information in the form of light, such as e.g. a ferret with working eyes and a visual cortex. Duplicate it with arbitrary precision, keep one of the copies in a totally lightless box for a few minutes and shine a dazzling but nondamaging spotlight on the other for the same period of time. Then open the box, shut off the spotlight, and show them both a picture.

The ferret from the box would see blindingly intense light, gradually fading in to the picture, which would seem bright and vivid. The ferret from the spotlight would see near-total darkness, gradually fading in to the picture, which would seem dull and blurry. Same picture, very different subjective experience, but it's all the result of physiological (mostly neurological) processes that can be adequately explained by physicalism.

Does the theory of qualia make independently-verifiable predictions that physicalism cannot? Or, if the predictions are the same, is it somehow simpler to describe mathematically? In the absence of either of those conditions, I am forced to consider the theory of qualia needlessly complex.