“We already live every day with clear demonstrations that unconscious phenomena can have all the appearance of consciousness.
The thing that moved Chevreul’s pendulum was a philosophical zombie. And it lived inside his mind. ”

We don’t _know_ that what moved the pendulum was a philosophical zombie. Isn’t it possible that our “subconscious” is conscious, but separate and independent, and thus not experienced by us? You’ve shown that the brain can fill in details for us and create memories, as well as filter many out. Perhaps the thoughts of the subconscious are but one more set of things that are filtered away from our conscious experience.

The fact that the decision process may not be instantaneous, but rather an extended chain of deliberation, does not, to my mind, “disprove” free will. It illustrates only that human perception of the world is not a pure experience of fact, but rather a convergence of numerous illusions — Our visual focus is physically rather narrow, but our brain assembles a mosaic of images into a panoramic vision of our surroundings. Our consciousness necessarily functions at a lag relative to the events surrounding us. What we think of as the present is actually always slightly in the past. So the fact that my “cognative footprint” — the interval that it takes to assess a situation and decide on a response to it — may be longer than I perceive of it as being, hardly seems to me to “disprove free will”. It does, on the other hand, vividly illustrate that the mind is a bigger and more complicated thing than we generally perceive of it as being.

The question of consciousness in others is a more mysterious one though. Because, given our sensory and rational limitations, our own consciousness is perhaps the only thing we can be truly certain of (Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum”), we are prone to anthropomorphize — to assume the consciousness of — other things. In western culture, we typically rationally adjust that assumption in favor of creatures more like us, and against creatures less like us (as well as generally against inanimate objects), but that’s a process that can be adjusted by cultural influences and personal experience. We tend to assume, though, that the robot turtles are not conscious like ourselves, and that other humans are — even though those assumptions can never be confirmed with absolute certainty. As advancements in computing and robotics pose ever greater challenges to the Turing Test, we can expect deepening philosophical dilemmas in the future over how our consciousness biases should be resolved.

God bless.