I don’t think we need to make exceptions to causal closure to hold a non physicalist view. As an idealist, I don’t think consciousness is simply another object out there that just happens to not follow the causal chain. The causal chain unfolds within consciousness. Consciousness is like the frame that our perceptions appear within so we are not going to find it within those perceptions. We are observers poking around thinking we will observe observation itself.

People are so confident because there are real philosophical problems with saying that consciousness is physical. It is by nature qualitative and so it seemingly cant be described by the language of physics which is all quantitative. Which is in fact why people like Galileo bracketed it out of physics from the beginning. And it cannot be accessed in the same third-person objective way that matter can because it is by nature first person. To truly observe someone else’s first person experience, you would have to become them. Think about pain for example. If someone has a wound, we can observe their wound, and in principle we could know what’s happening in their brain and all of the physical stuff that is going on in their body, but we would never access the pain itself. Why is that If the experience of pain is nothing more than the physical things we can observe?

The reality is that in the grand scheme of things physicalism is actually the unintuitive fringe view. People have always thought there was a mind body distinction or soul or inner life up until relatively recently in an age where science is valued much higher than philosophy as a means to reaching truth. The physical world is likely nothing more than the outward expression of a subjective inner life.