It's clearly absent from your description of physical interaction
'As I said, the photons from those pixels hits the cones and rods at the back of my eye and they convert it to an electrical signal which is passed to the visual cortex.'
It's not absent. It's part of the process.
You could have used something other than a physical object to try to show that it's not part of the physical process. Like 'happiness'. But exactly the same thing happens. Those photons still head off to the back of my eye and electrical charges (and likewise chemical and physical changes) take place and the word is understood for what it means. This is a well known process. There isn't anything outside of it that impacts on that process.
It's tangential, but more because your case against free will depends on a prior commitment to some flavor of physicalism. .
You can keep those goalposts exactly where they've always been. I've been constantly asking you what it is that's outside of the known processes that impacts on it in some way to change physical matter. Your words. Changes physical matter. And you haven't even made an attempt. Because it now turns out that what you have been doing is tangential to the question anyway.
I don't want anything 'tangential'. You've made a statement. You need to back it up.
Uh huh...you believe that symbols are physical...
Even a non physical thing like 'happiness' still has to be made available to me. How are you going to do it without there being a physical transfer of information? Say the word? Sound waves vibrating my ear drum. Type it out or draw a picture or show the actual object? Photons hitting my eye. Wave a dead cat under my nose? Molecules impacting my olfactory sensors.
And in any case, this is apparently 'tangential'. So on that basis we'll skip it. And you can go back to telling me what it is outside of the process that somehow, somewhere, changes physical matter. Apparently we can't detect what it is, but I want to know where we look for the effects it causes. Because, as you know all too well, all effects have a cause.