Come to think of it, this is not off topic at all. It follows that if AI can become conscious, it means that consciousness does not contain (or at least require) free will. That's if we agree that a computer running code has no "free will" no matter how complex the code is.
The question is badly posed and therefore meaningless. If the universe is deterministic, then you cannot have free-will as it is normally considered. If it is non-deterministic, then (by Bell's Inequality, if you want to throw around big terms) it is random, which is also not free-will as it is normally considered. If you have free-will, as we all feel like we do, then the universe can be neither deterministic nor non-deterministic. Something is smelly in Denmark; the question itself does not make sense in it's current form.
I am not actually an analytic philosopher, I just emulate them as a hobby.
It is so obvious that what defines our 'consciousness' is this self-believe in itself and not much else. We are programmed by nature to see ourselves as unique and special, because this way we are more likely to defend our own interest and to reproduce our own genes at the cost of others. This belief is so strong that it makes it near impossible to imagine that it is a mirage and that we are nothing more than a bunch of molecules.
Randomness would not equate to free-will, it'd be the opposite, since it would mean one's choices are completely disconnected from reality rather than a reflection of one's mental state and environmental circumstances.
In fact, a deterministic perspective is the only one where the idea of free will approaches coherency since it mandates that the actions of the individual are a function of who they are. If one repeats the scenario exactly, a person with free will must always make the same choice because if they didn't it would mean that their "will" is irrelevant with respect to what actually transpires in reality.
Aristotle's view is, to a large extent, the traditional religious belief (at least in the West). Aristotle would not have held that the soul was physical as you say, rather that the soul was the "form", or the animating principle of the physical body. The "magical phenomena" as the "residue of traditional religious beliefs" you mention is not really "traditional" at all. Descartes came along in the 17th century with his "res cogitans" and mucked up the whole issue by explicitly rejecting the traditional Aristotelian view.
My thought is that the defining characteristic of consciousness is suffering. If you can't torture it, it's not conscious. If you can, it is.
This would seem to rule out the programs that run on our computers. But, since we have little (if any) real understanding of reality, who knows?
What if you remove the ability of a person to feel pain? Modify chemistry just enough to always be high as if she had injected heroin? Does it mean the person is not conscious any more?
If we can simulate all particles of a human on a supercomputer and all the reactions to torture will be the same is it not really tortured?
As to the latter, it doesn't seem that that would be torture. As I said, though, I think we ultimately know nothing about this subject. Nor can we, even in principle.
Humans are incorrect all the time. Even researchers retract the previously 'proven'. Until the answer is clearly proven beyond all questions, pondering and researching is how we discover the unknown for that question, or error, and often so many other we didn't expect to find but come as a sideline of questioning the known. Intellectual curiously has great value for even boring and known of things.
We also don't have an explanation for what I call 'the harder problem' https://twitter.com/gfodor/status/1225230653932761088
As for qualia, I'm reminded of the people coming to my door asking, "Do you believe in Jesus?" I reply, "Do you?" and when they assure me fervently that they do, I follow up with, "Well, okay, how do you know you do?" I think you could do the same with r/Jesus/qualia/g.
It does seem like accepting that all other physical humans are conscious, and that there are no extra-physical phenomena in a physical human, implies that a simulated human would also be conscious.
One point against the traditional belief is that if you've ever read Aristotle you might be shocked to learn that the Greeks of antiquity believed that "soul" was quite physical, expressing itself in blood, semen, etc. The medieval characterization of mental illness as being an "imbalance of the humors" comes from this early idea about how we work. Needless to say, the definition of soul has retreated entirely into the metaphysical, where it's cannot be disproven, by definition.