Neurosurgeon Provides Evidence Against Materialism

[The Grand Nudger]

The insight (at least potentially) is that the schema isn't expected to contain information on how it operates, only that information that would be useful to it;s operation.  You don't need to know what an individual neuron firing feels like, so you don't, and thus the schema necessarily wouldn't "feel like" a description of it's mechanical function.

I'm not sure what the point here is. I'm not aware of neurons firing: of course. I'm not aware of most of my body's functions. But instruments can measure them. Perhaps in time there will be instruments that will be able to measure brain activity that corresponds to every conscious experience. I'll concede the point for the purposes of this discussion. My experience of awareness or directing my attention to something is not the brain activity the authors have in mind. It is something quite different even though you may assert a causal connection.

The point was directly answering the question that you asked.  Yes, it feels different. Yes, it seems obvious.

Your experience of awareness or directing your attention to something is -exactly- the sort of brain activity the authors were referring to.  One of the novel features of AST is that it's the only (hopefully, just the first one day) mechanistic explanation of consciousness that claims to predict the disparity between what your brain is doing and what it feels like, as well as the seemingly obvious conclusion that you have some non physical stuff capable of apprehending physical stuff and engaging in a causal relationship with it.  

That said, I'm not asking you to accept that AST is the most accurate explanations. Only using it to challenge the assumption that observing that experience doesn't feel like a description of it's process has anything probative to add as to whether or not it actually is. Imagine a ghostly AST, that posits that the mechanism doing all of this is not the brain, but the soul. It would still posit that your soul awareness doesn't provide you with the information required to make your soul feeling an identical description of it's soul process. You might even posit, in a soul world, that you have some sort of mysterious other stuff, not soul stuff, capable of apprehending soul stuff and engaging in a causal relationship with it. It feels different, and it seems obvious.

Because the experiment demonstrates that the decision corresponds to the behaviour or almost always does. If you want to argue either that a decision is a physical thing or that decisions are determined by brain activity then the experiment is begging the question. " Non-physical essence" was the authors words not mine.

Does this really have anything to do with what I would want to argue?  You just told me it would demonstrate those other positions wrong.  Well, if that's so, then there would have to be some way to tell, in the experiment, whether a decision was made by a physical or non physical essence.  

How does the mere presence of a decision demonstrate this? How can we tell this by deciding to do the chicken dance?

It seems to me that you're only asserting something that both positions can agree to. That we can make decisions, and that our decisions can influence our actions.