Answering this question is complex, it is one of the major questions philosophy has been grappling with over the last few centuries.
First order, dualism is a much better model
If you are only looking at consciousness, then dualism is a far better model of the mind/body than physicalism. In physicalism, no non-physical things can be causal, and as thoughts have no mass nor location, they have no ability to be causal in our world. But we experience thoughts as causal pretty much every moment of every day. We also experience our bodies influencing our thoughts -- as we are motivated by hunger/pain/lust, think more poorly when tired/inebriated, can be knocked unconscious, etc. This two-way causal relationship is readily described by interactive dualism. This is why post people in the world are dualists.
The reasons to adopt materialism/physicalism lie elsewhere than mind/body
There is an excellent paper by David Papineau titled The Rise of Physicalism that details the reasons for the development of a physicalist near-consensus in the mid 20th century: https://www.davidpapineau.co.uk/uploads/1/8/5/5/18551740/papineau_in_gillett_and_loewer.pdf Papineau looks at the history of physics, and the way physics itself did not support the "causal closure of physics" that is a key assumption of physicalism. He notes how it was the discovery f cellular biochemistry, and its utility in explaining cellular processes, as opposed to either emergent or vital forces that led to the rise of physicalist thinking. Papineau notes that dualism is not REFUTED by these observations, it is just less probable.
Papineau does not make his Latakosian Research Programme thinking explicit here, but he is using Lakatos' methodology -- Physicalism made some very useful predictions that led to fruitful science relative to cellular behavior and processes in the early 20th century, while Vitalism and emergence did not. Relative to the reduction of cellular processes to chemistry, and the reduction of chemistry to physics, there was significant "progressivity" to the physicalist reductionist paradigm, while neither the emergent nor dualist paradigms were making useful predictions of note -- hence they were regressive in efforts to explain the success of reductive physicalism relative to both chemistry and cellular biochemistry.
IF, as Papineau claims, physicalism is strongly supported by the rest of science, THEN it is reasonable to try to treat consciousness as an ongoing "work in process" problem for science to address -- and the better fit of dualism to our observations of causation, are just a challenge/problem that the physicalist Research Programme needs to continue working on.
However, Papineau's rationale has been undercut in multiple directions in the latter half of the 20th century
There are several key features of Papineau's paper that gloss over problem areas for physicalism.
Hempel's Dilemma: The most noteworthy of these problems, Papineau tried to finesse. It is Hempel's Dilemma -- that physics is, by virtue of being a field of exploration, intrinsically OPEN. Papineau tried to limit the physicalist doctrine to only the belief that material cannot be influenced by consciousness, and assert that we can be pretty confident of this, but how he might show this dogma to be actually the case for all potential physics advances -- he mostly just waved his hands at. Physics is just a science field, and causal closure of physics is not something either supported by physics itself, or by the methodology of science. Hempel is basically pointing out the conflict from treating a methodology or field of study as an ontology. Physics cannot be a stand in for an otologic theory of materialism.
A recent work exploring this problem for physicalism is Daniel Stoljar's Physicalism. Here is my review: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R13R2OUNXMIN6H?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp
Emergence: A second major issue for physicalism is intrinsic in Papineau's claim that emergence was defeated in the early 20th century. What actually happened was that the premise of universal reductionism made significant and useful predictions that held up and advanced science over a period of multiple decades. However, the universal reductionist programme, which Papineau explicitly ties to the rise of physicalism as an ontology, has stagnated for over 50 years now. MOST of physics reduces to either relativity or quantum mechanics, but not all -- and the efforts to link those two incompatible theories have all failed so far. Only about half of chemistry reduces to physics, and it is actually very little of biology that reduces to chemistry. Population biology, and environmental science, are really only understandable as emergent phenomenon. And psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, etc. are basically entirely nonreduced, and reductionism appears almost wholly useless in those fields. This is discussed in the SEP article on scientific reductionism. Section 5 notes that philosophers of science have mostly abandoned universal reductionism, and physicalist philosophers of mind have almost all adopted emergence or pluralism rather than universal reductionism. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-reduction/#UnrIss
Justification of science, and of scientism: Science is not self-justified. It is a methodology that is derived from the philosophic field of epistemology, and is a specific refinement of empiricism. That empiricism encompasses the entirely of ways to achieve knowledge, is not justifiable by science. And the rationale FOR science within empiricism, relies upon aspects of rationalism, and of intuition, and upon a circularity of empirical justification of empiricism. Almost no philosophers defend scientism, as it is not justifiable. As the debate has been held about scientism, almost all of its advocates, as they realize the weak foundations of the POV, have moderated their claims. But physicalism assumes scientism, in its whole-hog, unmoderated form. And we can know from basic philosophic investigation that scientism is wrong.
Abstract Objects: Values, morality, mathematics -- all are very useful working hypotheses, and by Popperian indirect realism, therefore are reasonably assumed to exist. Abstract objects are one of the major areas that physicalism fails -- as physics itself treats information, which is an abstract object, as an essential feature of our world. One of the frightening things for reductionists is also that many theoretical physicists consider that physics itself reduces to math. Which if this premise holds up, would lead to physics reducing to an abstract object, and physicalism would then be a variant of idealism ...
Failed test cases: Karl Popper, in The Self and Its Brain, spelled out the core problem that has constituted the Hard Problem of Consciousness. It is that, if thoughts are not causal, that evolution variation would lead to a decoupling of thoughts from our actions. The close coupling we see, shows that evolutionary selection has been operating on our thinking, and therefore it is causal. If our minds are not causal, we would either not have minds, or if they are an accidental byproduct, then our thoughts should be random.
Jaegwon Kim, in Physicalism or Something Near Enough, argues that the last 50 years of exploration of qualia show they are real, and do not reduce to brains. But that causal closure of physics prevents emergence theories from being physicalist, therefore any physicalist must adopt dualist epiphenomenalism relative to qualia. Note Popper's test case refutes Kim's solution, although his problem for physicalism remains. Here is my review: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1LFTMUSP8VEWB?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp
Papineau basically assumes that physics is intrinsically calculable. But the statistical nature of QM means it is definitely not deterministic, and many outcomes could be achieved with zero change in the inputs -- which is pretty far from "closed". IE, mental, social etc. influences could affect physics outcomes, with no violation of physics. The discovery of chaos theory provides a method by which quantum indeterminism can leverage up to macro scales. And physics conservation "laws" are all spontaneously broken. Papineau assumes properties to physics it does not have. see Deterministic or stochastic universe? and https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.93.25.14256
Takeaway
These multiple increasing and unresolved problems for physicalism suggest it is no longer a progressive Research Programme. The consequence of the accumulation of them is that alternative approaches to mind/body have become more widely pursued.
Idealism has gained the most popularity in recent years as an alternative. The best books I have seen taking an idealist perspective have come from Edward Kelly's research team. Here is my review of one of their books; https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RZY1A4EL2JOZ4?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp There are other recent idealists as well, including Donald Hoffman, Bernardo Kastrup, etc.
Russellian monism, where mind and matter are aspects of some more fundamental substrate, has also been explored a lot recently. This generally leads to pan-psychism, as does Kelly's version of idealism.
Dualism has also regained interest among philosophers, although to a lesser degree than the two options above. The best recent dualist I have read is Richard Swinburne, who I review here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R18J8OJA7QPLKX?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp
Each of these alternatives to physicalism do a better job of explaining mind, but may struggle to fully explain the rest of the world. The situation we are in today, is that none of these ontologies are currently fully satisfactory, as none of them have been able to be fully fleshed out without running into evidence from our world that conflicts with them. Lakatos provides a very useful reference -- we have multiple conflicting Research Programmes active in our thinking space, and each of them has problems they need to acknowledge and work on. Consciousness is one of the bigger problems for physicalism.
