2. For theoretical purposes,
I do agree that consciousness is the memory of all our sensory experiences, perhaps with some processing routines supplied by our genes (the hard-wired architecture of our brains). Where I disagree is that there is anything “left” when we remove this. Life, (and consciousness) are not things, they are relationships of things. The individual chemical compounds and their resultant cells, tissues and organs do not determine life, any more than the mind is a brain. Minds are what brains do, just like organisms, The Parthenon, Ferraris, sailboats and jet fighters have a behavior and possibilities that far transcend the raw materials they are built of. The design elements that go into these great machines (whether they originate in human genius, the mind of god, or blind evolution) are the result of their organization much more than their components. There is no obvious “life force”. The soul is a process not a thing, a verb not a noun, it is information. Information can be coded and transmitted. I can send you the blueprints of a great building or machine through the mail or over the phone. DNA is our blueprint, memory codes what we learn after birth, although there is no reason that same information couldn’t be coded in some other alphabet. I don’t think it makes any sense to talk of a ‘life force’ without it existing in some kind of body. However, just as different computers can run the same program, there is no fundamental reason why a personality (consciousness, soul, spirit) couldn’t execute on a different platform.

3. But it is also clear…
This pretty much repeats what I said in my response to 2., except that by ‘physical’ I believe you are thinking in terms of matter and structure. I think of life more in terms of energy and process. The matter and structure is necessary, but not necessarily unique. A great book exists independently of the paper and ink it is printed on, in fact, it could just as easily be coded on magnetic tape or computer memory or a CD, or carved into the sidewalk.

4. Not necessarily
I think language is getting us into trouble, here, we’re getting bogged down in semantics. What do we mean by ‘deterministic’? The quantum world is rigidly deterministic, it is determined by a very precise set of rules, it is not random at all. The rules may not be determined by cause and effect, by forces and action at a distance, but they are still determined and predictable by using probability and statistics. We know to a high degree of precision how many people will die in auto accidents this Labor Day weekend, we can determine that. Everyone of those crashes, when investigated by the police, will reveal an exact cause of why it happened. What we can’t determine is which people are going to die, when or where. The rules are different, but there are rules. Come to think of it, do we even know that? We make up rules in order to predict the results of our experiments and observations, but we cavalierly switch to different rules when in the quantum, classical and relativistic domains. All we know about the effect of the quantum world on the macro universe is that nothing in the former forbids anything in the latter. Other than that, the connection between the two is totally unclear, maybe even non-existent. Rules are something we make up, we use them until we find an exception. Then we modify them.

5. Now since we can’t detect
The key phrase here is “undetected physical matter of ‘life’. In 2. I suggested there is no such thing. Without that assumption (and one of us is assuming because neither of us knows for sure), the whole idea of Free Will is problematic. We really don’t know how to define it, much less tell whether or not it exists. We live in a fractal, chaotic universe. Just because everything is determined by something previous doesn’t necessarily mean its predictable. Sooner or later, the information you need to predict the future is too fine-grained to be seen in our present, or has been lost in our past. The universe may very well be strictly determined, but for all practical purposes we have Free Will. And if we can have both simultaneously, then our distinction between the two is obviously mistaken, arbitrary, or at the very least, hopelessly naive!

6.Which brings me…
Well, I’m familiar with the work you refer to, but I am very skeptical of the conclusions you appear to be suggesting. Helm hard over, Buck. You’re steering into shoal water there. I’ve heard others comment on the possibility of the ‘non-deterministic’ nature of quantum reality being a way to explain or suggest paranormal and metaphysical conclusions. Life after death? Mind over matter?
Extra-sensory perception? Maybe those things are true, but if they are, does quantum theory have anything to do with them, or is it just a way to legitimize the hand-waving and navel-gazing? I may be misusing Occam’s Razor, but I tend to be very suspicious of reasoning that tends to lead us where we want to go (usually for very different reasons). I’ll leave it at that and move on. While I’m at it, I’ll skip the next paragraph too, for the same reasons.

7.Non locality has implications…

8.Mind-body dualism aside,
I decided a long time ago that the determinism/free will duality is a false one. We are talking about opposite sides of the same coin here, not two coins altogether. We don’t need to pick one or the other, they are both right, or perhaps neither is. Determinism tells us that if we know the position and velocity of every particle in the universe, then we can calculate the state of the universe at any time in the past or future. But the whole point is we don’t know, and there is no way we or anyone can possibly know that. Even if we discount the Uncertainty Principle, we still can’t reconstruct all that past history for purely practical reasons. And if we can’t know something in principle, then there is no point in talking about it. Its like discussing alternative history, or speculating about what kind of plays Shakespeare might have written if he hadn’t died. It may be fun, but we’re not talking about the real world. I haven’t declared the free will issue resolved, I just don’t think it really matters.

Think about it. Even if you know the horse race is fixed, as long as you don’t already know the winner, flipping a coin is just as likely to tell you who its going to be as anything else.