Why materialists are predominantly materialists

[Angrboda]

Consciousness, experience, and feeling are composites.  Just as frontal lobe damage patients can appreciate risk without being averse to it, and cerbral achromotopsia patients experience an internal world devoid of color, we note that consciousness is a piecemeal affair, and those pieces correspond strongly to specific parts of the brain.

And what ever happened to the concept of "emergent properties"? Does that just disappear too?

I've never been a proponent of emergent properties. It has always seemed to me to be merely hand waving aside the hard problem, as in "enough complexity" poof, magically becomes consciousness. The tools we have for studying the operation of the brain are currently rather crude and primitive. My hope is that with better tools we will someday be able to see consciousness as just another set of brain processes, like memory. (Not to say we understand everything about memory, but through animal models we have been able to probe the mysteries of memory much further.) I don't find myself inclined to agree that the phenomena of consciousness will not yield to reduction. The processes in the brain are too large scale and can be too easily described in terms of classical mechanics for the cogs of the machine to not be capable of being elucidated.