A more effective term for physicalism would be reductionism.

So your question is, what is it being distilled from?

Epicycles were brilliant math, as a model of our view of the cosmos.

The problem is, the map is not the territory. If we tried to include all the information from the territory onto the map, any effective, useful signal would be lost back into the noise.

Knowledge is signal, but what is the noise?

If the premises of our knowledge are wrong, the underlaying assumptions, than all the shut up and calculate is just so much garbage in, garbage out.

Yet the signals we extract from the noise are what resonates and synchronizes with our prior knowledge base. Effectively going back to when we were small children. The grain of sand at the center of the pearl.

Which also applies to culture and societies. Basically religions as the lessons and memories of the childhood of the culture.

As these mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is the present going past to future. Though the evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

The basis of culture and civilization are the narrative and history of this temporal flow.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect. Like a tapestry being woven of strands being pulled from what was woven.

Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

The present goes past to future, because the patterns generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Suggesting consciousness manifests as energy.

Science has the same problem with energy, as with consciousness, in they can only be defined by the forms expressed.

The digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise.

Thus this intellectual focus on information. As well as that academia is the study and building on of prior knowledge, thus temporal.

Galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in. Wrapping around that vortex, that grain of sand at the center. Which is a function of the energy expressing itself, than anything of itself.

Waves synchronizing, energy harmonizing.

The music is more real than the matter.

There is no there there. Just puppies chasing their tail. Until they get tired, the feedback loop breaks and the energy radiates back out.

My version of the science.