I actually think it is a bit more subtle than that. I am here really focusing on consciousness as a subjective experience, which seems to be of an entirely different nature than physical processes. We have a lot of examples of emergent properties of complex systems, but as far as I can tell all of them stay in the same "realm": the emergent properties of an ant colony, for instance, are physical, resulting from physical interactions.
With the subjective experience as an emergent property, things such as a society, a country, an economy could become conscious, in the sense of having a _subjective_ experience of their own existence as entities separate from the rest of the world. If we accept the "consciousness as an emergent property", we _have_ to accept that possibility. Which, to me, is not less wild or unlikely than, say, the "theory" of a field of consciousness "received" or "captured" by physical systems with certain properties, the same way a radio can receive radio programs. There are additional reasons to want to consider alternative explanations, but going into them would rrquire much more space - if interested, I would point to the report of the Galileo Commission.
So it does not change anything to physics, really: materialism is pretty much the best methodology to unpack the laws of physics: whatever you observe, see if you can find more elementary physical processes that explain it.
I am just a bit irritated by bold statements which assume that we know for certain that consciousness is an emergent property of physical processes. We do not, and the reason why this is such an accepted fact is more sociological than scientific - Newton and others decided to focus solely on physical processes as a methodological tool, and over centuries, the undeniable success of the approach in making discoveries _and_ building practical tools gave it an ontological status it did not have initially (Newton was for instance a very convinced Christian). Which makes me keen to remind that, because in the current scientific culture it is shameful to even ask the question.