I don't see why this has to be the case. We posited different laws for fields

Sorry, let me restate my point.

if you postulate [merely the existence of] different laws for consciousnesses then you don't actually end up less confused about how consciousness works.

Actually stating the bridging laws might help with this.

good theories where fundamental psychological variables are causally entangled with physical variables, kind of like field variables are causally entangled with particle variables.

I don't see what making the psychology fundamental even buys you.

In that case, our best theory has sensations as an irreducible component

My standard is "could a superintelligence reduce these laws to underlying simple physics?" It's possible that psychology will turn out to be practically irreducible; I have no beef with that claim. I don't buy that it's fundamentally irreducible though.

If successful reductions are evidence for the general thesis of reductionism, then the absence of a successful reduction is evidence against the thesis

to the extent that a reduction would have been expected. Give neurology some time. We're making good progress. Remember, there was a time we didn't even know what the brain was for. In that time, dualism would have had a much easier stance, and its island has only gotten smaller since. Winds of evidence and all.

Dualists are claiming that we can't do better.

That we can't, even in theory, do better. That we, as in cognitively limited humans, can't do better is merely implausible.

Um... OK, then I don't see where we disagree. In the original comment you responded to, I was simply saying that "consciousness" isn't just a label for a set of neural interactions.

I think consciousness is just physics. I don't perceive consciousness as just physics, but then again, I don't perceive anything as just physics, even things that unambiguously are, like rocks and air and stuff. I can imagine a causal path in the brain that starts with "photons hitting a rose" and ends with me talking about the effing redness of red, and I can, in my imagination, identify this path with "redness". I suspect this will get clearer as we become able to stimulate specific parts of the brain more easily.