Thank you for writing this, Graham. To me it is a very sober analysis of the issue.

I just started reading "Mind and Cosmos" by Thomas Nagel (famous for feeling like a bat). The book is 10 years old now, so you might well have read it. So far, his argument is very much along your lines. (You mention the Transmission Model, which I've not heard of, and is not listed in Nagel's index.)

Nagel argues (not in so many words) there is an irrational stubbornness with physicalists, which relates to your psychological angle. (There is a similar irrational stubbornness in quantum theory as well.

I'm tempted to see this issue as a sort of "category mistake." Specifically, if you are a physicalist, then physicalism is a given. As a given, it underlies (tacitly) anything you say about the subject. More broadly, if you are a “true scientist” you don’t allow non-scientific explanations. To be more nuanced, some scientists allow non-scientific explanations, but some scientists don’t, and this might be because they consider themselves true scientists, and they define “true scientist” someone who does not allow non-scientific explanations.

To allow non-scientific explanations is ‘outrageous’ or ‘absurd’ the way a Christian who did not believe in Jesus Christ would be, or a married person who did not believe in monogamy.

That said, I greatly admire psychoanalysis and its ability to weed out unquestioned, unacknowledged or unspoken assumptions, so to me, it’s a bit of skating on thin ice for philosophers, scientists and psychoanalysts to insist they are not influenced by unconscious assumptions buried deep in their epistemologies.

So to be sure, a philosophical argument is capable of standing on its own merits, if everyone in the discourse accepts syllogisms, etc—and would they be in the discourse if they didn’t?