There's a psychological experiment where the researchers had participants watch a video of two teams playing basketball, one with white shirts and one with black shirts. Half of participants were asked to count passes only made by players in white shirts. The other half were just told to watch the video. Midway through the video a guy in a gorilla suit walks behind the players, waves to the camera, and then walks off. After watching the video, participants were asked whether they had seen anything unusual. Participants in the first group said no; participants in the second mentioned the gorilla.

Now the question: Did participants in the first group see the gorilla or not? On the one hand, they were presented with the exact same video as the second group. Gorilla photons entered their eyes and were presumably detected by their retinas, and the corresponding signals were sent up the optic nerve. On the other hand, the higher-order processing necessary for the brain to identify that particular stimulus as a gorilla and file it into memory to be retrieved later were not activated because they were otherwise engaged with counting passes and the workload that machinery can take on is finite. The first group may have seen the gorilla, but they didn't experience the gorilla on a qualitative level.

A materialist interpretation would include that, while they are themselves intangible, qualia can only arise if presented to the consciousness by lower order machinations of the brain that are tightly linked to physical phenomena, and those machinations are very much subject to natural selection. Presumably whatever mechanisms that cause us to experience the gorilla are also involved in things important to survival, like assessing whether the gorilla presents a threat and deciding to fire up the fight-or-flight response. If the gorilla were deadly, it's possible the ball-watching group would have experienced a delayed reaction and been more likely to end up gorilla chow. While we can assume that a lobster doesn't act in the same way - its threat determining and fight-or-flight machinery activate in the absence of qualitatively experiencing the gorilla, in humans, as far as we can tell, those processes are sine qua non for the qualitative experience to occur. Thus, I don't think the "pink pixel" experiment is particularly illuminating, because it presumes that because qualia may not play a role in natural selection, all qualitative experiences should be equally likely. Even our limited understanding of the phenomenon of consciousness shows that that isn't true. My argument isn't that our particular experience of consciousness just dropped out of the sky the way it was, I said it worked out the way it did predicated on lower-order physical phenomena. The "pink pixel" thought experiment seems like it purports to ask what the odds are of producing a completely ordered deck of cards by shuffling; but, in reality, it suggests we should be asking why shuffling a deck of cards doesn't produce non-existent combinations like the ace of queens or a 6 of spade-clubs.

The problems with assuming that evolution could not have produced consciousness because, if that were the case, we could just as easily have been metaphysical screaming pain ghosts trapped in bodies otherwise programmed to go about their lives and argue with each other on the internet is that (a) it's not a parsimonious outcome (the "screaming pain ghost" hypothesis doesn't coexist harmoniously with our accumulated understanding of consciousness), (b) it leads to epistemological nihilism. There's no way we can't say we aren't screaming pain ghosts right now because we'd have no way of expressing that fact. The idea that qualia can be empirically determined based on personal testimony, and arise from physical stimuli (with the requisite exceptions), is a prior in even the so-called "soft sciences" like psychology. Kastrup (and presumably by extension you) concludes that these are problems inherent in evolution, but they aren't; they're problems associated with assuming qualia aren't subject to any physical restrictions, which isn't something that any scientist that deals with the brain endorses, as far as I can tell. Your presentation of physicalism/materialsm is defined so narrowly that I don't think anyone actually subscribes to it.

My problem with Kastrup's article, which I haven't yet been able to get you to engage with directly, is that Kastrup doesn't demonstrate an alternative method of inquiry. His whole article is just dedicated to tearing down the current methods - it doesn't propose anything to fill the hole. We just grandly conclude that consciousness is an ineffable, irreducible, and inaccessible component of reality without any meaningful implications. If the nature of reality is such that our only avenue of accumulating knowledge about something is by examining its physical footprint and that there are whole swathes that remain fundamentally inaccessible and unknowable, that kinda sucks from a philosophical perspective but doesn't really provide any alternatives to what we're already doing and the epistemologies we're already using. But Karstrup asserts that his way will produce a better understanding. What's wrong with demanding him to pony up some evidence this is the case? It's also not intuitively ridiculous, it's epistemologically ridiculous. If something is, by its nature, intangible, incorporeal, incapable of interacting with physical reality and any methods of inquiry we might use, real or imagined, why would we bother going looking for it even if it's there? It might as well not exist. We can come up with equally impossible models all day with no way of choosing from among them. I say Plato is right and there is some conceptual realm of forms that only our minds can access. Now what?

Kastrup argues that consciousness cannot have evolved. Cannot involves a different level of certainty and a higher burden of evidence than "didn't." He's not arguing that consciousness could have arisen by evolution but he has evidence that there's an alternative origin, he's arguing that it's impossible for it to have arisen by evolution at all. Any semi-plausible explanation for consciousness that still adheres to what we know about evolution should be sufficient to dispense with the "cannot" claim, and I feel like I keep providing those. As for the "did not" claim, Kastrup doesn't provide any positive evidence or even propose an alternative mechanism or means by which we can search for an alternative mechanism. Unless he's willing to provide one of those things, I don't see why he's worth listening to.

Also, quantum physics is definitely not my bag, but I don't see how OOR departs from existing models of what we know about the universe and how it operates. It appears to be more targeted at addressing the problem of determinism, which isn't something that seems particularly relevant here.