Ok, some food for thought and discussion.

What you are doing right now is only in theory, using your computer is just a bunch of 0's and 1's, and in electronically terms that is on and off basically... there for everything you do on the computer is o's and 1's which make it all up and it only exists in theory. all the colors and letters are all made up of code of the 0's and 1's then they are converted by more code into what we see on the screen. It's just very crazy to think that all of this is just electricity.

is this similar to how our brains work??

if you can follow that.

no...because if it was, artificial intelligence (which would have to be defined in terms of sentience on a human level) would already exist.....

but, the brain....well, thatz one thing.....

however, many like to differentiate between the mind and the body; ergo, as a dualist (of sorts) i don't necessarily proclaim the brain as the mind....niether do a lot of scientists.....but it does seem that the mind is connected to the body via the brain.....

whatz interesting is that the brain does seemingly go on a code of sorts......the physical states of it....as for the mental states, thatz a whole different ball-game....they actually don't know what the mind is or how it works....how you can have one thought and then BAM! you're totally thinking, or remembering, or imaging something else.....especially in terms of memory....

say you're watching a movie you've never seen before, and then BAM! you're thinking about that time you were having sex in the backseat on a friday night with your girlfriend, and you had a fight....you had a lot of fights, like that time you were at her house for thanksgiving.....you had a big fight because you didn't like her mashpotatos.....she got all pissy....she always got pissy....thatz why you dumped her.....your mom makes good mashpotato's though.....hmm, you haven't spoken to your mother in two weeks, maybe you should call her tomorrow....

all this, this train of thought, memory, etc, all the while you're still watching the movie and comprehending it, also comprehending that you need to ash your cigarette....all this multi-tasking and thought sequence is far more complicated than binary-code.....

but what was it that made that thought sequence go into overdrive? you've never seen the movie before, so itz not like you watched it with that girl you dated, the actress looks nothing like the girl you dated, the story is nothing like your thought sequence, etc. etc. etc.....there's no connection between that movie and your thoughts.....(behavorists would say there must be; but behavorism eventually became a failed theory and has since been abandoned, but there's still some behavorists out there, lurking)

but how is it this thought sequence came to be, and how is it that it started with sex, then to mashpotatos, then to you thinking you should call your mother....where's the connections? there seemingly isn't one.....yet, at the same time, it seems there is....itz truly baffling.....

Camus used the term "absurdity" in his essay The Myth of Sysiphus (which justifies suicide....itz an existential essay....vidy, vidy interesting)....but i always liked that term, for he used it as a way to describe thoughts.....they're an absurdity....you're at a coffee shop drinking coffee and for some absurd reason you have a memory of sumtin' that happened to you as a child, sumtin' you have never thought about in forever, possibly even never until that very moment......how is this?

scientists, specifically psychologists, can't really explain this phenomena......but itz one of the reasons why many philosophers and scientists think artificial-intelligence is an impossible dream......

but yeah....the physical states of the brain seemingly do work the same way as a computer, but the mental states.....way, way, WAY more complicated....and still a total fuckin' mystery

i think that im with you on the physical/mental processes of the brain... but i theorize that the coffee/child, movie/sex issues have to do with memory cascades... something in the situation is making a connection or brushing nerve impulses with those old memories and, thusly, bringing them into the concious mind.

but, yes, we need to physically find memni before we can study them.

yeah, it does seem that there must be some sort of connection, but that was the Behavorists answer....(Pavlov's Dogs, B.F. Skinner, etc).....and i don't remember how or why, but i do know that Behavorism disappeared just as soon as it appeared in the world of psychology....it was eventually disproven, but it was a landmark.....

so, behavorism would say there is a connection in some way, while others say itz just an "absurdity" so to speak.....one interesting take on the mind is "epiphenomenalism" (epeh-fin-nomenal-ism) where they consider the mind as sort of like a shadow......a shadow, like from a tree, is considered to be epiphenomenal.....in that, it exists, but isn't coherently physical itself, and merely exists because something else exists, and doesn't really have any purpose or effect.....itz just there because the tree's there....in this case, the mind's just there because the body's there.....

In a way.

Electrons are real....sort of. They fall victim to the uncertainty principle, where they only have a probability of existing in a certain place at any given time. Our brains work on neurons, which work on electrons. Actually everything works on sub-atomic particles, meaning......GAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

*is dragged away gibbering and insane*

Then theres this cloud ( ATM CLOUD ) of data called the web where everything falls apart but ends up together via hundereds of routs at the same time ?

then you're arguing for predestination then, IVD?

We have no idea whether that is 'more complicated than binary code' or not. If you have enough binary then you can have endless complexity, I would suspect. It looks far more complicated than computers, but that is not the same thing.

All that computers do is to take information and generate a response. That's more or less what we do. It may be that 'free will,' our capacity for seemingly infinitely varied responses to situations, is simply a product of the infinitely varied situations that we are able to distinguish.

It is also perfectly reasonable to suppose that odd memories that strike us from time to time for no apparent reason are merely a consequence of an imperfect brain - it has retrieved something useless by mistake because it is slightly wrongly wired up, and it really meant to retrieve something else that would have been natural and obvious to you.

As you say, this is all 100% hypothetical, but I think that if there are credible solutions that do not require the existence of a mind that is separate from the brain then we shold be very reluctant to imagine that a separate mind truly exists, because it does not tie in with what we can see. It apparently ignores the laws of physics (by definition, being metaphysical), which seem to apply in every other known situation, and we'd need a very good reason to suppose that we should do that.