The reviewer maintains that "the internal electrochemical activity correlates with conscious experience rather than corresponds to our conscious experience. The latter term begs the question regarding the correctness/incorrectness of physicalist reductionism."

The reviewer completely misses the point here. It is not "begging the question" to propose that mind corresponds to our conscious experience, that is merely stating the thesis of identity theory!

I understand that this reviewer is committed to a naive realist assumption that there is a necessary difference and separation between the neural vehicles and their phenomenal contents. But that is not a statement of fact (even if the vast majority of theorists happen to subscribe to it!) it is merely a hypothetical conjecture that is no more certain to be true, prima facie, than the alternative identity hypothesis.

To claim that this is "begging the question" is like saying that Newton was "begging the question" by stating that space and time are absolute. But this was not a statement of fact, it was an initial hypothesis from which all the rest of Newton's theories followed logically.

And was Einstein "begging the question" when he stated that space and time are not absolute, but in fact it is the speed of light that is constant? This reviewer would presumably have complained that Einstein was "begging the question," because there was already a large scientific concensus that space and time are absolute, so until Einstein could provide incontrovertible evidence that space and time cannot possibly be absolute, he should not be permitted to publish the hypothesis that they are not. And had the hypothesis been rejected for publications, the subsequent tests of that hypothesis would have never been conducted, and we would have become permanently stuck in the Newtonian paradigm.

What this reviewer fails to acknowledge is that Newton's initial paradigmatic hypothesis was itself never proven to be fact, and therefore Einstein's later hypothesis should not be held up to a higher standard of proof merely because it was proposed at a later date. In the same way, the commonly held assumption that mind supervenes on brain in such a manner that the neural vehicles need have no resemblance to their phenomenal contents, is not an established fact, but merely a hypothesis, which is no more likely prima facie than the alternative identity hypothesis.

This issue is now made more clear in the latest revision, especially in the new Section 2.3 of the new revision.