Do you believe in free will?

[oxymoron]

I simply believe that the conscious mind, separate from the brain mechanism,

So the conscious mind is the Magic Pixie. The "mind" is a term of rhetorical use only. And "conscious" is terribly difficult to define. There's simply no evidence that anything exists separate from the brain; but why should it, any more than digestion should exist separate from the stomach?

Not to get too off topic, but let me ask you this: Are you the same person as you were 5 years ago, in so much as your identity hasn't changed? If you are, then what makes that so?

Memory, for one thing.

One of the fundamental ideas in quantum physics is that aside from state, two instances of the same atom are indistinguishable. Molecules are interchangeable by transitivity. In your brain, replacing one protein with another identical protein will not change anything, and so over time the encoded state is maintained even though the medium encoding the state changes.

The idea of "temporal continuity" is interesting because it can either be arrived at by a system with very good retention of state or by very poor retention of state. We see a movie ticking past at 24fps because our brains are just not quick enough to process the frames. It looks smooth and continuous, it's just a disjoint collection of images. And so our identity is just that hysteresis, the fact that we retain an after-image of ourselves that smooths over the joins - not because our brains are awesome, but because they're actually very very slow.