> It's clearly evident by the fact brain damage can radically alter your personality. That wouldn't make sense with free will.

Definitely, in the sense of some "other" thing other than your brain making the decisions. Its clearly our brains doing the thinking and deciding.

>You aren't one individual part of the system that has everything fed into you, you are the entire whole of moving parts in unison perceiving itself.

Well, yes. However, I can see how I could be a robot that does stuff and acts pretty much exactly like me. What I don't understand is how I can simultaneously see, hear, feel, think etc. Why do I have a feeling of singular consciousness? How can that kind of thing be distributed among many neurons, many atoms?

> The idea of consciousness as an abstract emergent property is therefore hard to accept

Yes. However, I think this is different than literally all other emergent phenomena. Emergent phenomena can really be thought of as abstractions. Eg friction is a phenomena that emerges from the properties of surfaces that create heat when rubbed together. Convection is a phenomena that emerges from the newtonian physics of particles bouncing around randomly. However, I can't understand consciousness as simply an abstraction of different parts of a brain interacting.

> But if those billion neurons are coordinating together to form a thought about feeling like Dave while juggling all those senses

The fact that someone can feel anything is already a big question mark to me. Any experience at all that isn't a single bit of information at a time seems irreconcilable with the singularity of consciousness we experience.

> They're instrinsically tied and therefore trying to distinguish them doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me

You're saying that if we had some kind of "soul" or "non-physical" thing that caused our experience, it doesn't make sense to distinguish it? I think it makes all the sense in the world, if it were possible. It makes as much sense as distinguishing between the heart and the lungs, or distinguishing between separate neurons in the brain. If we could distinguish it we could learn how to teleport people's consciousnesses one day, or upload them without destroying them. There are really incredible possibilities there, but no one would want to be teleported anywhere if the result at the end isn't them and their experience ends with stepping into the teleporter.

> if the colony acts a single unit, does the colony experience "ant colony-ness"

I don't know. I wouldn't think so.

> why would this perception only apply to the biological state of nervous systems. Wouldn't such a perception of existence also apply to inanimate things like atoms "feeling" like an atom or enormous scales like ecosystems or planets as a whole?

Great questions. I think its important that one day we figure out the answer. However, I don't think we're anywhere close, scientifically speaking.

> it only makes sense that this fundamental perception is shared by all things that exist at every level and in all combinations of state

You mean that every combination of material in the universe has its own separate perception? That seems highly unlikely. For example, while my nerves would be a completely valid combination, its such an absurd coincidence that I can experience only through mechanisms that my body can physically react to. The chair I'm sitting in isn't a persistent part of my experience, neither is this computer, neither is a rock on the other end of the universe. It seems like the only reasonable explanation is that experience is correlated with our nervous system in some way. It seems likely that the structure of our bodies somehow creates the experience we have. I just don't understand how.

> the coordination of countless subatomic systems interacting

Its very clear how an audio speaker creates sound. A signal causes a magnet to drive a large piece of material that in turn moves the atoms of the air in a wave, which propagates until it hits other non-air things, like your ear, etc etc. That kind of emergent phenonmenon is very clearly described in a reductionist fasion. You can point to any little piece of the sound and trace it back to its roots. Ie, you could take a molecule's velocity in the air that has been hit by the sound wave, and trace back the pattern of collisions that brought it there, tracing back its wave energy to the speaker driver, and the movement of the speaker driver to the electromagnet. Each piece of the "emergent phenonmenon" is separate the whole way through. Not so with our experience. You can point to where light comes into your eyes, and what parts of the brain fire off because of it. But the experience of it itself, and the combination of vision, sound, thoughts, is not explained so easily. The parts are there, but the reason that it causes an experience like what we have is not at all clear. I hope one day we figure it out!