If it turns out there isn't anything intrinsic, I'm willing to change my view. Doesn't bother me. But it seems unlikely to me that reality just keeps going smaller ad infinitum. Nothing seems to suggest that, thus with current scientific knowledge it seems like a reasonable conclusion. I also didn't mean to suggest that necessarily it has to be interactions between separate intrinsic items. I just phrased it like that for simplicity's sake. It could also just be a singular intrinsic field with disturbances throughout it, or something else entirely. Just one or several "things" that are intrinsic. I never decided to focus on this point because it's, well, irrelevant.

Also it is my understanding that QTF hasn't actually proven itself as a solid framework as of yet. Regardless that's besides the point.

Hard problem of consciousness isn't a hard problem at all. I never found any of the arguments particularly engaging. Of course figuring out how consciousness emerges is difficult. Doesn't mean there is reason to believe it somehow arises through magic. Absence of evidence of it being an emergent property is not evidence of absence. People used to think the earth was the centre of the universe and now idealists and what have you think the same about consciousness. Please, get real.

The whole consciousness conversation is just boring. Simply a matter of waiting for science to explain it, nothing more.