I personally think the distinction is agency, that is, the ability to act in some way, however small. A rock in space has it's orbit, this cannot change. The sun is a very very complex system, but it is all deterministic (unless there's some profound thing going on in it we have yet to comprehend). But a plant bends itself to face the sunlight. You can show all sorts of chemical and biological explanations for the behavior, but it is still "behavior." It can be predictable, but it is not deterministic.
I am personally of the opinion that consciousness is something fundamental, not some emergent result of complexity or some evolved trait that exists only because it is a fitness benefit, and that all living creatures have it to some degree. What exactly it is or why or how it exists is beyond me, and I'd love to know, but I think it is plainly obvious on it's face that it exists, is not an illusion, and that something very strange is going on here.
>You can show all sorts of chemical and biological explanations for the behavior, but it is still "behavior." It can be predictable, but it is not deterministic.
What makes it non-deterministic? A neural network is a system with a huge number of parameters and therefore a wildly chaotic output, but the output is still deterministic. Even if you introduce a number of environmental confounders.
To claim that brains are (more) non-deterministic (than other kinds of macroscopical physical processes) you would have to show that quantum effects have a (more) significant impact on their outcomes.
Well, let's start at the foundation of reason and what it means to reason. Descartes demonstrated that the only two things that any observer can verify with certainty on his own are the existence of his own consciousness and free will. Everything else can be reliably ascertained but not known with certainty, due to the nature of interpretation.
This is in stark contrast to modern materialism, the view that what's real are the observations and measurements of the world around you. But to me, to question the existence of consciousness and free will, things every one of us can verify we have with simple thought experiments, while holding our external observations as true, even knowing full well we can never verify them with certainty, is a bit absurd. And if there is free will, that is, capacity for a living creature to decide a course of action on it's own, then there is necessarily some nondeterministic element to it's behavior. And that is what we observe when we look at living creatures, and one defining distinction between living and non living things.
Again, to chock something we experience directly up to illusion while holding things we don't experience directly as truths is a bit absurd. So I do think there's something very interesting going on with the whole consciousness and free will thing, one that we don't understand, and I think those phenomena are intimately tied to the phenomenon of life as well as the phenomenon of evolution.
I said nothing of qualia. Science has no tools to even begin trying to model, describe or explain them. All I am saying is that from a physical perspective, a mind is just as deterministic as an orbit. So far nobody has discovered anything to suggest otherwise. You're taking a concept that exists outside the conceptual space of physics and using it to make statements about physical systems.
I am personally of the opinion that consciousness is something fundamental, not some emergent result of complexity or some evolved trait that exists only because it is a fitness benefit, and that all living creatures have it to some degree. What exactly it is or why or how it exists is beyond me, and I'd love to know, but I think it is plainly obvious on it's face that it exists, is not an illusion, and that something very strange is going on here.