I always thought of consciousness as like a double pendulum or other chaotic system. Governed entirely by physics, and you can simulate it given hypothetical in

I always thought of consciousness as like a double pendulum or other chaotic system. Governed entirely by physics, and you can simulate it given hypothetical initial conditions. However, the sensitivity to the initial conditions is so high that it's impossible to look at a real world instance of the system and then predict its behavior more than a trivial amount of time into the future. It's entirely possible for consciousness to be mechanistic without being deterministic.