Neuroscience and free will

When I try to understand your posts I keep getting down to what seems to be an underlying materialist stance. Perhaps I am misinterpreting what you say, but being an engineer, I tend to take the literal meaning of your words.

I'm an engineer too

One thing I am trying to point out is that anything that has an explanation (this causes this casues this...) is mechanistic. It is based on things that reliably repeat. Things that repeat reliably we assign words of solidity or hardness to convey immutability and from these words we get materialism. So ultimately anything that has an explanation can be brought under the tent of materialism.

But I believe there is an aspect of reality that has no explanation. There is a prime cause that lies on the border of the mechanism at the dead ends of the causal chains. Consciousness and will and experience lie on this border. They exist in between mechanisms.

So my experience is my experience and is un-explainable, ineffable, and unique. But as soon as I attempt to explain it or explain anyone else's consciousness, it is immediately brought down into the domain of mechanism and material.

Materialists claim that the fundamental reality is rock-like reliability and repeatability and solidity and objectivity. This is flawed because of (1) the limitations of induction and (2) the exclusion of all data that is not reliable or repeatable under the assumption that it is noise or flawed and (3) definitions are entirely subjective so how do we know whether anything repeats at all unless we choose to define arbitrary boundaries that include or disinclude?

My patternist viewpoint is that the fundamental reality is pattern and patterns do not exist without subjective experience and subjective choice about where to draw the boundaries that form the patterns. So consciousness is inherent in everything. I am not saying consciousness is primary and matter is built on consciousness or vice versa. I am saying consciousness operates on the boundary or the interface between a duality - between mechanism and... something else which is ineffable. That something else is given many names but once it begins to be described it is brought into the realm of material and mechanism. So we can only orbit around that ineffable thing - the oneness of being - with poetic language and metaphor.