On the other hand dualism refitted for the physicalist world seems like a hack at best. Panpsychism fails the inference to the best explanation or Occam's razor etc.
"you can form a propositional belief that "Consciousness is without effect", and not see any contradiction at first, if you don't realize that talking about consciousness is an effect of being conscious. But once you see the connection from the general rule that consciousness has no effect, to the specific implication that consciousness has no effect on how philosophers write papers about consciousness, zombie-ism stops being intuitive and starts requiring you to postulate strange things."
For further reading consider LessWrong's Zombies sequence which tackles Chalmer's arguments and property dualism in general https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Zombies_(sequence)
From my perspective WRT occam's razor, it looks quite different. If panpsychism is right, there is only one kind of matter. For panpsychism to be wrong, there has to be two different kinds of matter (conscious and unconscious), along with a mechanism to transition between the two states that is mediated by a physical process. Furthermore, despite the transition being mediated by a physical process, the difference between these two states is something undetectable to current science.
Beyond that, if you assume consciousness is the result of some physical characteristic of brains (which materialists usually do), you have to realize that most of the biochemistry going on in brains is going on all over the body. Do my organs and other body parts have their own consciousness? Furthermore, our experience of consciousness doesn't even extend to the entire brain. What is different between non-conscious parts of the brain and conscious parts? Physically the neurons themselves are basically identical. If it is the way that they're connected, those connections just change the simple physical forces acting on the particles of the brain. You again have to answer the question of how simple physical forces convert matter from unconscious to conscious.
I think you have it mixed up. Panpsychism is the dualist belief, although it differs than supernatural dualism it's still dualism. It says that matter is singular but had two properties the mental and the physical.
Whereas materialism is monist all the way through. You raise good questions and science and philosophy are still working on it but it doesn't require any extra properties or matter and agrees with scientific evidence therefore simpler.
Let's assume that experience is irreducible, and you accept your own consciousness (which I hope you do!). That seems to leave a few possibilities:
1.) All normal matter is conscious 2.) Some normal matter is conscious - and we're back to the problems I previously listed 3.) Consciousness is matter/energy of a kind physics has completely missed somehow
From my perspective, #1 is the simplest, #2 is complicated, and #3 seems implausible given the fact that we've so precisely probed reality down to the sub-atomic scale.
Also, we should be careful about being overly reliant on scientific evidence. The only evidence for the existence of consciousness is your own subjective experience of it. There is no objective evidence that consciousness exists. It would seem to me that we should at least be able to prove the existence of consciousness before we make the claim that scientific reductionism can explain it.
Or take for example the fact that a few hundred years they couldn't figure out fire so they made up a new property (not too unlike pansychism):
"In general, substances that burned in air were said to be rich in phlogiston; the fact that combustion soon ceased in an enclosed space was taken as clear-cut evidence that air had the capacity to absorb only a finite amount of phlogiston. When air had become completely phlogisticated it would no longer serve to support combustion of any material, nor would a metal heated in it yield a calx; nor could phlogisticated air support life. Breathing was thought to take phlogiston out of the body"
The points I'm trying to make:
1. Emergent properties are real. Just saying that reducing something makes it hard to explain doesn't make that thing a magical thing.
2. History shows that it's kind of silly to invent new type of matter or properties when we fail to explain something.
We have this black box that we barely know much about inside our skulls. It could be an amazing machine that generates consciousness yet before trying to reverse engineer it some of us likes to say "it's actually not that thing, it's something else that has the magic".
Chalmers position is property dualism where certain informationally rich systems have conscious properties in addition to physical ones.
Anyway, materialism is a monism, like Thales saying the world is made of water. There's nothing that necessitates the world be a monism. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't.
Panpsychism is another dualistic view of the natural world than requires no supernatural component. Everything has a mental as well as material aspect.
And, of all the phenomena that might be identifiable as emerging from the fabric of reality, the one that distinguishes you (and other systems you recognize as sufficiently like you) from everything else just happens to be the one you've decided must objectively be set apart.
I'll ask again: in this framework, what remains "supernatural", and why can you reject it?
Anyway, the question of what fundamentally exists is an ontological question. Materialism is one possible answer. All that fundamentally exists is material objects, and everything else, including mind, society, abstract concepts, etc emerge from that material substrate.
Idealism would be the opposite answer. Everything is mental, and material objects are just ideas presented to the mind.
Everything is mathematical would be another possibility. Or information, perhaps qubits (it from quantum bits).
But maybe aspects of mind and matter are both fundamental to what exists. Or maybe it's some third neutral substance that's neither.
But whatever the case, none of that need involve the supernatural. It can, if one is disposed to think that way. One can say that God created the material world (granted, that leaves God as the something else, but at least the world gets to be entirely material).
There is no good reason to believe that any ontology you can come up with to help you describe and attempt to comprehend reality, on the time and energy scales you live on, has any basis in the fundamental nature of reality.
The only distinction between atoms and phlogistons, physiology and the theory of humors, is their explanatory and predictive power, but none of those is any more "real" than the others beyond how they help us symbolize the world in a way we can reason about.
There is no good reason to believe that consciousness is any different, other than unexamined chauvinism, or, at best, wishful thinking.
Reality doesn't give a fuck what circles you draw around some fuzzy densities in an energy field, and what labels you write on them. Cars and sandwiches, atoms and quarks, where you end and the air around you begins, these distinctions that only matter to "you". This is the tyranny of the dichotomous mind.
The amount of unjustifiable, and, on the scale of the universe, unearned arrogance that it takes to assert that you or anything about you is set apart from the rest of material reality, is staggering, and just not something that I'm capable of sharing, having seriously considered the alternative.
Honestly, I'm just not sure we can have this conversation unless you can assure me that you have fully considered this to the point of having to pull yourself out of a serious existential crisis at some point in your life.
Any platitudes that come down to "there must be something that objectively privileges the nature of our existence above that of a rock or an endless field of eternal cold emptiness" are just totally baseless, and fail every test that might distinguish it from "god has a plan for me", "love is a physical force that directly manipulates time and space", or "it's turtles all the way down".
But then to circle back around and privilege materialism as being somehow distinct from all the other ontologies humans have argued for? Are you skeptic or are you dogmatic materialist?
Pick your side. Just so you know, equating every other ontology as the equivalent of "God having a plan for my life" is piss poor philosophy, and just ignorant.
Or, rather, always does that, like all of us do all the time, because that's what permits us to continue to live and think in the conditions and on the scale we find ourselves inhabiting, because that's the basis on which our minds work. But does not attempt to claim that any of the distinctions that happen to be useful to me have any fundamental basis in the raw nature of reality.
"Materialism" of this type is the default position in the same way atheism is the default position. The burden of proof is on the claim that there's something beyond material reality, and both dualism and theism are making this claim. It is the same claim. The only difference is the details of exactly what the supernatural thing is.
That is something there is not and cannot possibly be any evidence for, beyond "just take my word for it". In that way, dualism is indistinguishable from the existence of god or gods or magic or reincarnation or any other supernatural thing. To permit the possibility of one is to permit the possibility of the other. And there is no more evidence of one than the other, nor can there be. Again, there is no reason besides chauvinism or wishful thinking to believe in a theory of reality that makes you or something about you special.
I'm not going to extend the slightest benefit of the doubt to any theory of reality which says "I, and people/things/systems I recognize as like me, am intrinsically special and set permanently apart because something about me is fundamentally different from everything else", which dualism always comes down to. Any more than I'd be inclined to trust the objective truth of any theory of politics or economics or anthropology which says "I, and people/things/systems I recognize as like me, am intrinsically special and set permanently apart because something about me is fundamentally different from everything else".
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EDIT: I am definitely, full-heartedly, whatever Daniel Dennett is.
What exactly is the distinction you're trying to make between "non-physical" and "supernatural"?
What basis is left to make that distinction on, once you've abandoned the material realm?
What distinguishes your "plane of consciousness" from "heaven" or "the astral projection spirit crystal healing field" or "the power of positive feelings"?
I do agree that self-awareness and intelligence exist along a spectrum, along which we are apparently the farthest point.
I'm not saying that we are the only "conscious" systems, or that "consciousness" is something set apart from the rest of reality. I'm saying the exact opposite of that.
Your point (at least, as I'm reading it) is exactly what I was getting at with "and other systems you recognize as sufficiently like you", which I did not intend to be chemical-biology-centric.
What I am arguing against is "dualism", and its many hidden forms and names (including the one goatlover is espousing). Which is the idea that "consciousness" is some fundamental property of nature, set apart from (really: privileged above) the rest, that exists on some plane beyond material reality.
Which, I argue, there is no good reason, besides pure unexamined chauvinism, or wishful thinking at best, to believe
This is what you are also saying, no?
If I had to label myself I would say I'm a monist, in that I don't think mind and matter are separable or independent. I lean towards idealism in the sense that I suspect the set of possible states of consciousness is a superset of the set of states of matter that are possible according to the current "laws" of physics. Don't read too much into those labels though, that's only a first order approximation of my view.