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.
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.
Except that every one of us experiences otherwise daily in our own decision making.
How exactly are you down voting me? I thought HN doesn't allow us to down vote responses to our own comments.
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.