So. Science is is squeezing more and more computational power into smaller and smaller spaces; but why should that lead to life that has free will, qualia and inner experience?
I am proposing that _______ (pick your term: morphogenetic field, psychic energy, free will, spirit, entity with agency, etc) can impose itself on the causal chain of a mechanism but that this is very difficult (requires more psychic energy) when the probability is low that that the mechanism will experience a random failure. The mechanism's probability of random failure is its "boundary" or surface upon which its causal chain might be manipulated or altered.
A completely deterministic causal chain is an idealized simplified domain. Like in mechanical engineering there is the subject of statics (bridges buildings, etc) where we assume the sum of forces equals zero and there is no motion or vibration. Now in reality everything is moving a bit but we simplify it so we can make reasonably accurate predictions within the domain.
Likewise mechanisms may operate as if they are composed of completely deterministic causal chains up to a point, but if you follow the chain back far enough you will encounter increasing uncertainty in initial conditions leading to chaos. You may ultimately follow any causal chain back to the foamy planck length soup of randomness.
Begin with an obvious mechanism with obvious deterministic causal chain. Gear A turns gear B which turns gear C, etc. Very high probability that you can predict the position and velocity of a gear in the causal chain. Very low probability that your mathematical prediction will fail. Very little opportunity for free will to act upon the causal chain to alter it. Very low "surface area" or boundary between mechanisms. Large amount of "psychic energy" required to exert will upon the mechanism.
Now let's shrink the "volume" of the mechanism in proportion to the "surface area": let's take the mechanism of a light bulb. It has a long thin delicate filament operating near failure. The L10 life (average length of time when 10% will fail) of a light bulb is pretty short. The probability of the mechanism failing is much greater. The opportunity for "free will", a "consciousness field" or "psychic energy" to disrupt the normal operation of the mechanism is much greater. The amount of psychic energy required to pop the light bulb is much lower. In fact it is a fairly common poltergeist type of phenomena (which I have myself experienced on two occasions) where a peak in emotional energy coincides with a nearby light bulb popping.
A vacuum tube is not much different than a light bulb. An array of vacuum tubes increases probability of failure further.
Transistors operate even closer to the edge of randomly failing and have gotten smaller and smaller to the point where they actually rely on the quantum uncertainty principle or quantum tunneling and errors or random breaking of the causal chain happens more frequently, but redundancy builds in error correction.
A neural network takes this even further where the threshold value for action potential that determines whether the neuron fires or doesn't fire is much finer and probabilities are much less resolved and you have billions of neurons in parallel outputting what amounts to a probability rather than a certainty. (Say you have a neural network trained to recognize cats and you feed it an image of maybe a cat and it will return a probability that the image could correctly be labeled as "cat").
We could speculate (Penrose Hammeroff) that whether the neurons in the brain fire or not is influenced partly by the microtubules which are composed of dipole bonded molecules that can flip like bits and are very much subject to quantum uncertainty... in which case you have orders of magnitude greater "surface area to volume ratio".
Imagine consciousness is like a tree rooted in the quantum uncertainty. The will or spirit or psychic energy enters the tips of the tiniest roots in the past and filters its way up larger and larger more deterministic causal chains and mechanisms until you get to the trunk that unifies all the possibilities into one decision point which then branches out again to all possible futures. If you only examine the trunk and perhaps a larger root or two, you would think the tree is all mechanism and free will is an illusion, but if you keep digging you find that this seemingly firm solid tree is rooted in nothing firm at all.
At bottom, I suspect this is a panpsychist view, which in my opinion is "backdoor materialism", with the inbuilt notion that material stuff is the cause of the mental -- that the mental emerges from the physical in some unaccountable fashion.
If you adopt materialism, then idealism will inevitably sneak in the back door. If you adopt idealism then materialism will inevitable sneak in the back door.
If we must adopt a monism I prefer "Patternism" which emphasizes equally subject and object and includes mechanical materialism and loosy goosy idealism as essential poles rather than emphasizing one and claiming the other is illusion.
I'm with Bernardo Kastrup and Donald Hoffman who both support the idea that what we perceive as matter is just the appearance of certain aspects of universal mind/consciousness.
Matter is a pattern that has consistent repeatability for timescales that are relatively long in comparison to our own consciousness.
We've got in the habit of confusing AI with independent, conscious organisms. The very phrase "artificial intelligence" has that key word, "artificial".
And are we not the artifices of some other sentient creator(s) that attempted to re-make us in their image and likeness? Children of the gods learning to create our own worlds and entities in our own image and likeness? Attempting to create worlds and AI will teach us about our own world and our own consciousness.
