In truth a clear-headed physicalist shouldn't be thinking any of these dualist thoughts. If pains are one and the same as C-fibres firing, then there really isn't any possibility of having 'one' without the 'other'. Once you properly appreciates physicalism, this dissociation should cease to appear possible - C-fibres with pains should strike you as no more possible than squares without rectangles.

Natural selection has ensured that each species achieves the requisite effect somehow, but it doesn't care, so to speak, how the trick is done.

I say that there is nothing deficient about our current theoretical grasp of mind-brain identities. The problem is only that they are counter-intuitive.

The 'phenomenal concept' issue is rather different, I think. Here the question is whether there are concepts of experiences that are made available to subjects solely in virtue of their having had those experiences themselves. Is there a way of thinking about seeing something red, say, that you get from having had those experiences, and so isn't available to a blind person?

A century ago mainstream science was still quite happy to countenance vital and mental powers which had a 'downwards' causal influence on the physical realm in a straightforwardly interactionist way. It was only in the middle of the last century that science finally concluded that there are no such non-physical forces. At which point a whole pile of smart philosophers (Feigl, Smart, Putnam, Davidson, Lewis) quickly pointed out that mental, biological and social phenomena must themselves be physical, in order to produce the physical effects that they do.

I think that there are non-physical laws all right: genuine (if not strict) laws written in the language of biology, economics, and so on. But I don't regard that as a contentious issue. Even reductionists about chemistry will think that there are special chemical laws whose formulation makes essential use of chemical terminology.