Thank you I appreciate your opinion. I do think that we are reacting to external stimuli even though our ego is uncomfortable with being deterministic in any way, which is the free will point that you hit on. I think that is likely to be the point that keeps the argument going as it’s not a settled debate absent any AI, which we clearly all see as either deterministic or semi-random when the temperature gets turned up.

As far as the argument about being loaded in memory, if there’s any consciousness in AI, it’s obviously in different form than a biological consciousness. We’d have to agree that consciousness does not require a body to get past this.