"What is special, if anything, about organisms that have nervous systems built on organic chemistry that could enable something else?"
For the most part, I agree with you. Why shouldn't there be silicon architectures that get arbitrarily close to the agential quality exhibited by life. On the other hand, I do not yet see anything designed by us that comes close to the complex sophistication of life at the finest scales. In part this seems like a design problem in that we design our chips to function in exact and narrow ways. We engineer against exaptation, much less do we design for anything like Levin style polycomputing. As far as I can tell, nothing in chemistry is solely a camera, microphone, or chemical sensor. The usefulness of molecules in given contexts determine function. This matters to me exactly because enumerating/coding the affordances via modern techniques would almost certainly lead to an explosion in computational complexity, monstrous scaling mismatches or worse. I suspect that the computing architectures we have already found, while impressive and hard won, are still far from what we would need to do meaningful massive multi-channel and heterogeneous information processing at the density we see in life. This is all to say, I doubt we do anything particularly "special", but I would bet that the sun will burn out long before we have agential computers as interesting as life. Regarding free will, I have nothing new to say that we haven't already hashed many times before.
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