It's literally like this:
Materialists/Physicalists: "The thoughts in your head come from your conditions and are ultimately the result of your organs and nervous system. Your consciousness is linked to your brain activity and other parts of your body interacting with the physical real world."
Dualists: "Ok but what if there were an imaginary zombie that has the same organs and molecular structure as a living person but somehow isn't alive on some metaphysical level. If this zombie is conceivable, that means it must be metaphysically true somehow."
Materialists: "That's circular and imaginary, isn't it?"
Other dualists: "Ok but what if I were in a swamp and lightning strikes a tree and magically creates a copy of me but it's not actually me because it doesn't have my soul."
Am I reading this stuff wrong or are these actually the best arguments for mind-body dualism
It isn't though, your idea fundamentally does not differ from vulgar materialism if you don't give consciousness by itself any agency. You mention "gaining new properties that the fundamental building blocks do not have" but this doesn't really make sense to me, all the properties gained by the new system are in your mind, the qualitative leap from "nothing has emerged" to "something new emerged" happens within your mind, not in physical reality, in physical reality it's just the same old atoms. So for that reason to me saying "consciousness is emergent" isn't really all that different from for example Daniel Dennet's reductive physicalism where he claims consciousness is illusory, you're still left with this gaping huge explanatory gap between our quantitative models of the physical world and the qualitative worlds of our minds.
But it doesn't, you're still claiming material reality is the only causal agent in whole of existence, saying that certain material systems cause emergence of consciousness is just a semantical trick where you gave certain kinds of physical processes a new name, you're saying the same thing as the vulgar materialists.
To further drive my point: How would you as an emergentist approach researching consciousness differently than a classical vulgar materialist? You'd still probably be gathering a bunch of neural correlates and then try to concoct a mathematical model of the whole thing, no? That's what people like Daniel Dennett are doing to.
Why does consciousness have to come from somewhere else or be removed from the material in order to possess agency or exert influence over the material?
I'm drawing a distinction between what I think are two different concepts (I'll use "vulgar" and "dialectical" as signifiers for them but I understand you may have different understandings of both words). I may not be communicating it very well, but you're going to have to explain away the differences if you want to convince me that they're both the same concept.
edit: I wrote this before your edits. fwiw I'm not approaching this as a researcher of consciousness but as a regular person, so I can't speak for how effectively this model suits that line of work. it's been a good fit for my understanding of myself and the world, but I'm willing to expand or change it if there's good reasons to.
Because the alternative makes no sense. What exactly is the difference between saying consciousness emerges wholly from the workings of the material world and saying consciousness literally just is the material world? The logical endpoint of both ideas lead you to the same place: consciousness supervenes on the material world.
You didn't solve the causality problem by arbitrarily declaring certain physical processes are actually a whole new thing that now somehow has a life of its own.
Well that's the explanatory power of emergence in my mind, that something can qualitatively change when its more basic parts reach a critical mass of complexity. Consciousness seems to possess an essence or nature that defies explanation or examination, and in my reading and talking with people they seem to either reduce it to nothing more than its parts (consciousness doesn't exist except conceptually, everything is simply material) or ascribe some form of alienating dualism to it (consciousness exists external to the body).
And the synthesis that works for me is that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. It's an attempt at a sort of dialectical dualism, where the consciousness exists (more than just a conceptualization or construct of material mechanisms but actually exists in reality) and can exert influence on other things that actually exist, while also springing from and being influenced by material mechanisms. Causality is complex and dialectical, not linearly one dimensional.
But, again, it doesn't. You say it does because you arbitrarily claimed certain physical processes to have a life of their own even though they still act according to the same set of relatively simple rules governing all of material reality, all of the complexity of those systems still fundamentally is due to the workings of those relatively simple rules. You did not resolve the dialectic, you just obfuscated it a bit more.
Are a monkey and a human equally capable of influencing their material world? Are both equally capable of examining and reflecting on their own consciousness and altering or refocusing the processes that make up their own consciousness?
No, but not sure where you're going with that, my point still stands. You still claim both the monkey and the human are wholly subservient to physical laws. Just because both do something more interesting than just colliding with other matter in a predictable, and one of them does even more interesting stuff, doesn't automatically mean their consciousness has agency under emergentism, you attributing agency to either is arbitrary because when it comes down to it you still believe physical laws rule everything.
The only way to properly go about this dialectic is acknowledge the specific character of consciousness and that it exists separately from but is heavily intertwined with the material world.
Well then we have to define agency to figure out exactly what we're talking about. There's a continuum of difference between a rock, a mosquito, a monkey, and a human and their ability to alter material reality (including themselves). I might say agency and consciousness are both good ways of conceptualizing that difference. What is agency to you?
To me it's causal efficacy at the base ontological level. Under emergentism consciousness does not have agency on an ontological level but rather on an abstract one, at which point the definition is arbitrary and not very useful most of the time.
If you say matter is the only substance with causal efficacy at the ontological level then anything else you say about consciousness is just a rephrasing of the same idea.