the idea that mental beings can emerge out of complex processes in the brain is fundamentally flawed and can never be tested. If material processes operating through known physical laws generate as a side effect sentient minds how can we ever measure the existence of those mental beings? Mental beings are private and can never be directly observed and are only inferred from their behavior, but according to emergence they have no effect on behavior since all their effects are really the byproduct of brain processes. Therefore conscious entities which merely pop into existence as epiphenomenal side effects of the brain software disappear into nothing since they cannot be measured, observed or inferred in any way. This is eliminative materialism whereby we achieve consistency by throwing away the introspective evidence.
There is to be fair another form of emergence which aims to show that consciousness is actually efficacious and that it at least has some unique influence on motor action. Since pain and pleasure evolved it must have an evolutionary purpose. John Searle calls this emergence 2 as he says below:

“This conception of causal emergence, call it "emergent 1," has to be distinguished from a much more adventurous conception, call it "emergent2." A feature F is emergent2 if F is emergent 1 and F has causal powers that cannot be explained by the causal interactions of a, b, c...If consciousness were emergent 2, then consciousness could cause things that could not be explained by the causal behaviour of the neurons. The naive idea here is that consciousness gets squirted out by the behaviour of the neurons in the brain, but once it has been squirted out, it then has a life of its own. [...O]n my view consciousness is emergent1, but not emergent2. In fact, I cannot think of anything that is emergent2, and it seems unlikely that we will be able to find any features that are emergent2, because the existence of any such features would seem to violate even the weakest principle of the transitivity of causation”

I have to agree with Searle here. Emergent 2 is a worthy goal because it gives real causal power to qualia such as pleasure and pain.but it makes no sense. If the second to second reverberating of neural impulses is responsible for the squirting out of the conscious self and its ongoing maintenance then surely it is also responsible for every decision made by it.

Is there any choice but eliminative materialism, one which can have the efficacy of consciousness and qualia and still be logically conistent? The only alternative is dualistic. The subjective self is a fundamental enduring non-emergent entity which experiences the qualitative virtual reality content created by the brain and can interact with the brain. I discuss in this paper. http://philpapers.org/rec/SLETLO-2
Only subjective agents that exist with the same fundamental elemental status as say an electron can truly be efficacious and therefore have effects that can be measured and known. This implies that the known physical laws are not complete. However, with what is known about the probabilistic nature of quantum physics it is certainly possible that real mental entities can exert an independent force thereby influencing the probability distributions of matter.