@Dutchess_III Why not? The brain-in-a-jar model of the 19th century has been largely discarded for decades. It’s not just the brain which thinks; it’s the entire nervous system plus many other organs which release glandular squeezings. It’s called the “body-mind.”
Just as a practical example, to demonstrate that this isn’t just a hypothesis, there has recently been a breakthrough in getting people with severed spinal cords to walk again. It turns out that the spinal cord itself can trigger walking behaviour without any connection to the brain, and that electrical stimulation is enough to allow some otherwise paralyzed people to walk again. The spinal cord is thinking.
Beyond that, Roger Penrose’s quantum brain theory suggests that any sufficiently complex, self-referential system produces consciousness as a side effect. The stock market, for example, shows the same kind of stochastic, mathematically chaotic heuristics that one finds in the human brain—and might therefore be conscious despite not even having a physical body, much less a brain.
Modern computer simulation has shown us the highest-scale structures of filaments of superclusters of galactic clusters, and numerous physicists have remarked on the amazing simularity in shape to human neurons. It may be that the physical laws which underlie reality itself are inherently connected to the phenomenon of thinking, and that a brain is only one way of manifesting it.
Personally, I’m partial to biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic field hypothesis in which RNA and DNA acts as a sort of antenna to tune into an energy field which contains data such as racial memory and patterns for creating life. This fits neatly into the holographic Universe theory that our three-dimensional Universe is actually a simulation originating from a two-dimensional data matrix expressed on the surface of a hypermass the same way a video game is a simulation of data expressed on the surface of a hard drive.