Your brain is a physical, neurochemical machine, but its not so much like a computer-machine in that it uh… plays by different rules, uses different kinds of ‘programming languages’.

Consciouness is an ongoing experience, it is a process, it is the result, the output of the sum of your brain’s ‘functions’.

Unlike silicon, brains can heal somewhat, they are neuroplastic, they can essentially rewrite their own programming somewhat, as a very loose analogy… but its different than computers.

Computers have a hard divide between hardware, and software.

Code either runs or doesn’t run on hardware, maybe you have to swap out hardware to get some code to run.

Brains… brains rewrite their ‘software’ by literally, physically, reconfiguring themselves, literally growing new connection patterns and letting others go dormant, wither.

So that would… sort of roughly be like you actually could ‘download more ram’, somehow actually change your cpu into a gpu, just by writing code… these are very rough and technically innacurate analogies, but the very high level concept is what I’m tryig to convey.

Still though, just as computers cannot work without 0 1 bits, brains cannot overcome the most fundamental aspects of how they work, and in human, mamallian brains, a huge basis of how they work is via emotional associations, and emotions fundamentally are, imo, certain levels of certain neurotransmitters being released in certain contexts.

Sorta like how flavor profiles of food is in at least some sense, basically made out of just 5 different chemicals our tongues can taste.

Though obviously its more complex than that as the texture, consistency, temperature, other physical material properties of food alter the eating experience, maybe thats roughly analagous to how brains also take in situational context and past experiences/associstions when feeling an emotion.

As a high functioning autist, I exist in a weird realm amongst most humans, where I am much, much more explicitly aware of my own logical train of thought, of how and why certain ‘inputs’ lead me to certain ‘outputs’… but this is also more difficult to ‘compute’ all the time, it can be overwhelming to be fully aware of it all, almost all the time.

Compare this to most neurotypicals, for whom a large amount of their decision making and analysis/situation response … its unconscious, if you ask them to think about how and why they think the way they do, they tend to get angry, view such a request as rude, whereas for high functioning autists, that’s just the default mode.

NTs tend to be less precise, less exact, use a faster but less accurate heuristic in many contexts, basically just bullshit their way through a lot of situations with ‘close enough’ type decisions…

…whereas a high functioning autistic will be more neurotic and stress over crafting a ‘perfect’ response or decision… at least, untill they gain awareness that that is what they are doing, and try to develop and ingrain some rules or methods for themselves to … sort of halt a runaway program that’s eating up waaay too much memory.

The neurotypical paradigm can be advantageous when processing speed is more important than precision of result, but it can be disadvantageous when those conditions sre reversed.