You put yourself at the center of your considerations and start with the thinking. This is arbitrary and only works with logic. Why not start with things and follow along. When you do that, you see how life created central nervous systems, and these finally made consciousness possible. This is not a medical consideration, but an ontological one, i.e. what philosophy should do.
And that consciousness you can look at and measure it. But what you cannot do is experience what belongs to others. Others can tell you verbally what they are experiencing, but you cannot feel it.
The idea that this experience can be described in physical terms is nonsense, because experience is neither a physical nor a biological concept. If you want to translate this experience into biological terms, it is nervous excitement. And you can only feel this yourself.

Qualia and reductionism
The problem can be solved quite simply by
1. Depicting the difference between life and inanimate nature
2. Realize that subjective experience from the first person perspective cannot be scientifically investigated
To 1. Life is already a structural concept and life is structure in that it can only be explained by the interaction of 'dead' building blocks. When we speak of life, we mean a system and not individual elements, because life is not represented in any single element.
However, physics only describes 'dead' matter, i.e. individual elements, so it cannot describe life with its rules. Trying to reduce life to physics must therefore fail. This applies not only to life in general, but to all expressions of life, including consciousness. Consciousness is a property of the individual, more precisely, of the brain.
Biologically, consciousness can be described as the orientation performance of a (central nervous) living being.
So whoever tries to explain consciousness physically commits a category error.
To 2. Consciousness is thinking and feeling, in general: experiencing. You can observe and measure this from the outside, you can experience it from the inside. But this experience is subjective. Nobody can feel my pain, it's my own pain and therefore you can't objectify it except by means of statistical correlations, but that's something completely different.
Conclusion: the hard problem of consciousness is a chimera! See: dr-stegemann.de

The fault of many, if not most, philosophies is that they start with thinking and not with things. The Kantian question, for example, what can I know, places the human being as an abstraction, as it were as a pure spirit that, like a machine, can think about God and the world in a pure form. This idealized, individualized fictional human does not exist.
The starting point of every discussion must be the human being that has become biologically and socially.
Then the Kantian question is posed in a completely different way, and so is the answer to it.
So there is not man per se, but a priori the biological and social man. And this must be used as the starting point of all thinking.
While abstractions are possible a posteriori in science, as a prerequisite of an ontology they are not.
Man's biological dimension means that his relationship to the world is not that of a reader to a book. We transform the world into a neural modality and construct it with it, i.e. not only do we write this book ourselves, we also make the ink for it ourselves.

How about the following consideration: Of course there is an external reality, I notice that at the latest when I drive my car in front of a tree. But what do we do with external reality? We don't image them like a camera obscura does. We transform reality into a neural modal reality. We don't know how 'close' our neuronal reality is to the outside world and will never know, because we can only think with neurons. So we can't make a comparison. In addition, our brain constructs our reality, so it turns stimuli into a holistic spatio-temporal scenario. It creates this theater of consciousness, which we believe is identical to reality and, above all, that we can - transcendently - recognize it.
What an illusion!

You're absolutely right, determinism depends on perspective. Everything is deterministic from the perspective of the Big Bang. The further I zoom in, the more indeterministic my perspective becomes. From the point of view of the single individual, the world is indeterministic, even more so from the perspective of a photon.

Regarding free will: firstly, it is relative and secondly, everything that has to do with life starts at the molecular level, not at the quantum mechanical level. And cause life is a concept of structure, meaning that life can only be understood as a structure, free will can also only be understood from the point of view of structure theory.
Your approach is interesting nonetheless, but you have to transform it into the world of structures. Then you can see that the macro determines the micro.

It is an epistemological question how to describe something. Of course, psychology describes consciousness from a very different angle than biology does. So when we have a psychological question about consciousness, we consult psychology. But we wouldn't think of asking biology how psychology should work.

Imagine a tree. A painter will describe its form and color, a physicist its atomic structure, a biologist its biostructure, etc.pp.
It's always the same tree. It is only described from different perspectives and with different categorical means.
Just apply that to the mind-body problem and you'll see that it's really a bogus problem.
We are all biological beings - right? Then we must also be biologically describable. If we want to describe consciousness biologically, we should use a biologically usable term for it, e.g. nervous excitability in the sense of an orientation performance or some other terms.
Information is not a biological term, nor is mental.
When information is used in the context of biology, it is more in everyday language to represent complex relationships, but it is not a biological analytical term.
So don't keep mixing biology with psychology/philosophy.

No, nothing goes beyond biology. It's just the descriptive level. Imagine someone threatens me with a gun, I see that and run away.
Described biologically, this means: a stimulus hits my eye, is sent to the brain, associates patterns there, and there is an afferent stimulus that generates a movement.
Described psychologically, this means that I become aware of a danger, my brain activates an escape reflex and releases hormones.
Both times I consciously experience a situation and describe it with different sign systems.
In biology, the psychological/philosophical concept of consciousness means - I'll call it - neuronal excitement or orientation etc., whatever, it's exactly the same.
Nobody would think of seeing the biological description as causal for the psychological description.
But that is exactly what makes the mind-body problem.

Imagine a stimulus hitting the eye and being passed on to the brain. There it is associated with patterns and triggers an afferent stimulus that leads to movement of the extremities.
Exactly this process, which is described here biologically (I know, very simplified), can also be described psychologically or otherwise, namely: I see something, think about it and run away.
Both are exactly the same, only in a different language and through a different perspective.
Would you now come up with the idea of wanting to derive the second description from the first or wanting to see a causality between the two? Of course not. But that is exactly what one does when one asks how thoughts arise from neurons, or more generally: how does mind arise from matter.

how did you get the idea that I wanted to separate the brain and the mental? Exactly the opposite is the case. I've said it umpteen times here, there are different perspectives with different categories from different sciences. Who mixes that, has the mind-bodyl problem. It's that simple. I'll say goodbye at this point, thank you very much.

Yes, neurons generate mental content. But that is nothing more than everyday understanding. If you want to argue with scientific precision, you have to separate the neuronal, i.e. physiological, level from the philosophical or psychological. As I said, we must not say that apples make pears. If you want to explain something mental, you have to derive it ontologically and only then translate it into the language of psychology.
The whole mind-body problem arose from this hasty category mistake. In the case of the ancient Greeks, this is still understandable, because there was no division into different sciences with their respective conceptual apparatus.
Today, however, it is obvious, but continues to be mixed up, unfortunately also in academia.

If by non-physical things you mean psychology, we have a different sign system than biology. Biology creates the ontology, thus answering the question of what life is and what exactly does consciousness mean there. When we have that, we can try to apply these created categories to other (human) sciences. Only then do things like meanings, thoughts, etc. come into play.

I have presented the mind-body problem as a pseudo-problem using an equation that makes no sense. This equation represents exactly the mind-body problem.
However, one can learn from this pseudo-problem, namely that one must categorize this problem correctly, and that in a uniform monistic language. Physics, which deals with inanimate nature, is not an option for this, but biology. One must then understand consciousness as a biological category in order to establish a unity between nature and spirit.

As long as the difference between animate and inanimate nature is not seen and only physics is used to clarify both, one will never understand the principle of life and just as little consciousness. A discussion is therefore only worthwhile with those who want to get involved with this point of view.

'The whole is different from the sum of its parts' is a very general expression that applies to life in general. Thinking, on the other hand, is a very complex process that only developed in the course of evolution, which also applies to thinking, but which cannot simply be transferred.

Unfortunately, you don't understand the whole thing. It was just about showing that you can't explain philosophy with physics. But this simple connection already seems to be too difficult. Well, never mind.

I wanted to point out two things in my post:
1. The mind-body problem is based on a misunderstanding in which two different languages are related to each other, which can be illustrated with the equation: n neurons (physics) = consciousness (philosophy). It is therefore wrongly tried to explain a philosophical concept physically, which is simply not possible.
2. Since we are all biological beings, it must be possible to explain all expressions of life (including consciousness) biologically. To do this, you have to biologically operationalize what we call consciousness. If you do this, you get the general concept of orientation for consciousness and for this the central nervous system has developed in the course of evolution.
And now one can specify this concept of orientation for all other human sciences.
Actually quite simple, isn't it?
No, because science still doesn't want to or can't understand that life is already a concept of structure, life is structure, because not one of the dead building blocks of life contains life. The phrase 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts' is actually wrong. It should mean 'the whole is something other than the sum of its parts'. As long as you don't understand this, you will always want to reduce biology to physics.

Although Spinoza saw a unity of body and mind, he also believed that both were two sides of the same, but could not explain this unity.
My approach says that body and mind are not two sides of the same coin, but that consciousness is a property of the brain and it has the function of orientation, just like the heart has the function of pumping blood. That's a big difference. Nowadays, Spinoza's approach is more represented by the so-called four E's. There one sits on a naïve phenomenalism and squanders the opportunity to analyze the complex levels of regulation and their connection analytically.

Life consists of molecules and can be adequately described with them. The quantum level is not necessary for this. Imagine you drive your car into a tree. What was the cause of this, such as quantum fluctuations? Of course not. You drove too fast. Quantum processes are the result of this macroscopic event. Reversing the chain of causality makes no sense.

I think life can be explained by the way (dead) molecules work together. That is, the lower level of life is molecules. Consciousness at the level of molecules can also be adequately explained with this. The fact that molecules consist of atoms and that these can be represented quantum mechanically is irrelevant. I only explain the function of a car by its components such as cylinder, fuel pump, etc.
I see consciousness as a property of the brain as the heartbeat is a property of the heart. It can be described objectively as a structure and subjectively it follows the sensitivity that is already known from unicellular organisms and occurs there as a reaction to chemical gradients.