Does consciousness emerge from matter like wetness?

I hear saying over and over again, also by prominent scientists and philosophers, that there is no real "hard problem of consciousness". The typical argument is that consciousness emerges like the wetness of water: gazillions of non-wet water molecules stick together and develop a substance that is wet. Roughly speaking, the so-called "hard problem of consciousness" goes as follows: how can unconscious matter, made of unconscious and insentient atoms, molecules, and neurons, arrange into a brain, which has conscious experiences as a sentient being? How can a quantitative increase in the complexity of an unconscious system generate conscious qualitative sensations?.

The neurons-consciousness relationship compared with the molecules-wetness analogy sounds like a reasonable explanation. Isn't it? Consciousness is just an emergent property arising due to a bottom-up aggregation and activity of neurons, that, however, don't fundamentally possess it, like water molecules and wet water. Problem solved. Right?

But somehow there remains the feeling that something is missing here. There is an unaware (unconscious?) conflation that, nevertheless, we seem to have a hard time becoming aware of.

If you carefully think this through, you may realize where the fallacy is: there is no wetness in the world "out there", no more and no less than there are tastes, smells, colours, pains, and pleasures. One might even say that putting together non-wet water molecules does NOT develop wetness.

At first, this statement may sound absurd. Right?

But the fact is that in physics there is no such thing as "wetness", rather one speaks of viscosity (a measure of a fluid's resistance to flow). What we call "wetness" is a quality, and that philosophers of mind call a "qualia", that emerges only **after** nerve to brain transmissions **in** our conscious awareness. It is like a shadow projected onto our sensory "screen of consciousness," not the real thing that projects that shadow. Our language betrays this when we say that water "feels" wet, seemingly implying that it is an illusion.

Thus, the emergence of wetness is an interesting analogy that, however, doesn't add much to the understanding of the emergence of consciousness. On the contrary, it only deepens the problem further. The perception of what we call "wetness" is itself already a qualia in our consciousness, and, therefore, its generation by a bunch of insentient molecules and neurons remains mysterious as the emergence of sentience, feelings, and all the other subjective perceptions as well. The emergent property of wetness doesn't clarify anything in this regard, and the explanatory gap between unconscious matter and consciousness remains abysmal more than ever.