If the Only Tool You Allow Yourself is a Hammer...
...you'll have a hard time painting your ceramics.
Ed Feser, over on his philosophy blog, makes the following useful observation:
[T]he problem [of consciousness] is a problem in principle, and ...it isn’t going to be solved by further application of existing methods precisely because the problem is generated by the application of existing methods. ... [T]he problem of consciousness is a result of the move Galileo, Descartes, and Co. made of taking color, sound, heat, cold, and other sensory qualities out of the material world and relocating them in the mind’s experience of that world. Having thus made matter essentially devoid of qualia and qualia essentially immaterial, there is no way on this picture of things you are ever going to “naturalize” qualia. You are stuck either with a Cartesian-style dualism ..., or with an incoherent eliminativism. (Incoherent because the qualitative experience whose existence you will be denying in the name of science forms the evidential base of science -- a problem Democritus and Schrödinger saw but Dennett does not, pushing ... his usual line that consciousness is an “illusion.”) The only true solution to the problem is to see that the post-Cartesian conception of matter does not capture the entirety of its real nature in the first place, but is merely a useful simplification.
Or to put it another way, materialism does not even completely account for matter.
There's Another Cow Off the Ice
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