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Given physicalism, why something exists rather than nothing and its related reformulations are the sole family of questions that are outside the domain of science. That's a lot of the point of my post. You can't posit things beyond science if the physical is all you have and philosophical attempts to do so are confused. Is the thing you're pointing at in and of the world or is it external? If everything is in and of the world, then all things are moved only by things in and of the world and so all apparently hard questions have answers in and of the world.
Man, I appreciate the thought, but you can't just say "given all the important parts of my argument as axioms, here are some consequences" and make big claims based off that. I could go into some big thing explaining Kant and phenomenology and philosophy of science and so on but it's late and I'm cooking and it won't help you.
I dunno man, all the "physicalists" out there still worrying about the hard problem of consciousness or p-zombies or free will or identity seem like they could use a hand. Beyond that, if parsimony doesn't get you finding dualist a dirty word I've got no more ammo on that front.
So the thing is, the question of consciousness is fundamentally prior to everything we discover through consciousness in the physical world. In Kant, for instance, the question is something like "what are the conditions of possibility for us to experience the the world, with minimal assumptions about the world", whereas physicalists (your choice of term, not sure about the scare quotes, it's a fundamentally metaphysical theory and has to hold up on the level of metaphysics) just make an absolute shitload of assumptions about the mind because, you know, if you give someone a brain injury it does weird but consistent things to them. As for "dualism", it is and has always been intended to be a dirty word, but it also presupposes a lot of assumptions you can just discard by stepping outside of the frame.
Why do you find parsimony dispositive except as a heuristic? It seems to me that parsimony is valuable in making snap decisions, but the reality is that the world is complex. If you're a general making decisions on troop deployment with parsimony as your high heuristic, you're going to lose the battle. Likewise, if you're a scientist using parsimony as your key criterion, you'll get stuck in a local maximum of whatever your field of study is. The world is big and tangled and not all that amenable to parsimony, as useful as it is as an anti-bullshit heuristic.
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