What are you claiming happens differently in a computer by which it "decides" to open a file than what happens in a stove when someone pushes a button to turn on an eye, or what happens in a faucet when one pulls a lever to make water flow from the spigot?
In all these examples implicitly a human presses the key, turns on the gas, draws a beer. But what about non-volitional events (and what 'volitional' means is a work in progress in this conversation) like iron oxidizing in rain, lack of rain causing a plant to die or mold growing on a wall because it's damp?
Do you claim that when you decided the content of your above post, you could not have possibly decided to write a different sentence at some point?
Yes, since I can't see how any alternative could work. Simultaneously I have no emotional attachment to that answer ─ I feel about my decision essentially the same way I felt about them when I was a small kid, knowing they were personal to me, something "I" did.
How do you think it could work except as by chains of cause+effect plus the odd possible random input / stimulus?
Define "energy" as you are using the term here and state your deduction by which you have demonstrated it existence by dropping a brick on your foot.
I use 'energy' to mean 'mass-energy'. Mass-energy is what was in the Big Bang and what everything is made out of, and being made out of energy, responding to other properties of energy. (I can't rule out that the contents of the Big Bang were a salad of things, but Occam's razor tells me to stay with monist simplicity until I no longer can.)
Looked at another way, as with the falling brick, (mass-)energy is a quantifiable natural phenomenon present in all things with mass, and transferable between them, not freely, but as a transfer from a region of higher to a region of lower energy (whence the leveling out of energy gradients that is entropy).
Obviously you cannot deduce a quantity that is useful to physics by dropping a brick on your foot. Correct?
I'm not sure what you mean here. I can quantify energy in a number of ways, with a multitester, thermometer, balance, spring scale, accelerometer and so on. When I drop the brick on my foot, as I said, my senses report it in relative terms rather than pre-agreed units of quantity.
So you're saying that "the systems necessary to sustain" your concepts and memories do not possess mass?
I dare say there are plenty of massless photons mediating EM phenomena in my brain in their virtual way, but biochemical and bioelectrical phenomena such as constitute memory, concepts and so on have mass.
I'm not sure this is relevant to what you're saying but I'll put it in in case it is: the concepts in my brain exist as sets of phenomena in physics, but the contents of those concepts don't have to be real. If we liken our ability to form concepts to a drawing pad, then we can draw unicorns, zombies, Donald Duck, on the pad, just as we can draw a landscape or our dog, or our car on it; and we can form concepts of unicorns, zombies and Donald Duck just as we can form concepts of our local park, children, dog, car &c.