Why materialists are predominantly materialists

[Bunburryist]

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.

The biggest problem I have with the emergent property idea is that, while in physical systems, and even social systems, the whole "system" is there from beginning to end.  In the case of solidity being an emergent property of cooling water, everything can be accounted for from beginning to end.  In physical terms, we can, in theory, count the atoms and account for all the energy.  Everything is there.  But in the case of the emergent property of say, the taste of saltiness - the experience of taste can't be found in the same physical context as the "observable" brain processes.  There is no way to physically detect, define,  observe, or describe any experience.  That is, no "mental" emergent property can be "found" in the physical processes that, according to the emergent property theory, result in the experiences.