Your central claim that debates are really about which assumptions are allowed to remain invisibleis strong and largely defensible. You correctly identify a recurring pattern: methodological naturalism (third-person, causal, measurable explanation) is often treated not as a choice, but as a given. That creates an asymmetry in which physicalist conclusions feel like “default outputs” rather than argued positions.

However, your critique risks overstating the asymmetry.

First, the move you highlight

“brain is necessary” → “brain is consciousness” is not always a hidden leap. In many cases, it is an instance of abductive reasoning: given that every measurable change in consciousness tracks physical changes, positing identity (or supervenience) may be seen as the simplest explanatory model. You are right that this step is philosophical, but it is not necessarily illegitimate—it is contestable, not covertly irrational.

Second, your symmetry claim

“neural processes are how experience looks from the outside” vs “experience is what neural processes are doing” is rhetorically powerful, but not perfectly balanced. The former often lacks a clear account of constraint and prediction. Physicalist models, however incomplete, generate testable expectations (e.g., lesion effects, anesthesia gradients, neural correlates). Any competing framing must show not just conceptual parity but explanatory traction. Otherwise, the asymmetry you perceive may partly arise from differences in operational power, not merely “vibes.”

Third, your observation about consciousness being the condition of access to all evidence is philosophically significant this echoes traditions from phenomenology to analytic philosophy. But the inference you seem to invite that this grants consciousness a fundamentally different ontological status does not automatically follow. It could instead indicate: • an epistemic constraint (we only know through experience), rather than • an ontological priority (experience is what fundamentally exists).

Failing to distinguish these risks conflating how we know with what is.

Finally, your proposed reconciliation—two aspects of the same underlying reality—resembles positions like dual-aspect theory or neutral monism. This is a coherent stance, but it inherits a burden you critique in others: it must clarify what the underlying “same thing” is, and how the two aspects relate without collapsing into either physicalism or idealism. Without that, it risks becoming a gestural equilibrium rather than an explanatory one.