Are You Just a Brain or are You Consciousness?
Monistic Idealism and Materialism Offer different Answers to Humans
Most would say that humans are much more than a brain -- it's felt, intuited, sensed and known throughout one's lifetime, scarcely questioned. Some may disagree about what that "much more" is, yet one knows who one is inside, and one has opinions, ideas, meaningful values about the world outside.
Is the Ability to Make Meaning a Fluke of Evolution?
In the dying materialist paradigm, it is believed that the world is "out there", solidly real, but basically without meaning, as is one's interior life. Reality is without meaning because the interior life of the human being - one's inner awareness of oneself and life in general, including thoughts, emotions, values, intuition and creativity, all the processes that assign meaning - is believed to be merely a secondary artifact. It's an artifact of evolution, or natural selection, or the accumulation of ever more elementary particles into atoms, then molecules, then DNA, genes, cells, organic structures, and finally the brain. Interior life is evanescent, immeasurable, fluffy, and just not scientifically important. It's the hardware - the brain - that counts.
In a materialist world, each human is reduced to being an arbitrary three pounds of electrical and chemical brain matter. In this world, meaning and values evolved gratuitously by chance "in here". What's important is the measurable "reality" of "out there".
The materialist paradigm directly and indirectly informs, shapes and overwhelms so much in this culture that one's own knowing is mistrusted, and one often feels alone, separate and despairing due to a shadowing sense of unworthiness.
Or Is Meaning a Part of Causal Consciousness?
In a world of the Perennial Philosophy (as above, so below), of monistic (nondual, unitary) idealism (as contrasted with materialism, not the traditional definition), described in the paradigm of Science within Consciousness, evidence is mounting that the "out there" is really the evanescent stuff and that the "in here" is the primary cause of it all, in connection with a larger consciousness from which the individual's emanates.
Some may think of this larger consciousness as "God", others as"the transcendent domain of quantum potentia, the resident address of all quantum possibilities," as Amit Goswami, Ph.D., states in his book, God is Not Dead. "In the view of quantum physics, all attempts to distinguish between nature and 'supernature' [the supernatural, nonphysical, transcendent] have lost complete credibility."
The Entangled Hierarchy of Life
Humans as consciousness choose from among the many nonmaterial quantum possibility waves that flow through our universe from the transcendent consciousness of "God", collapsing the chosen waves into the "solid" particle forms that are known as the material world. This is how Madonna, the brain and every materialist scientist came into being as well.
So the true order, as best as science can tell now, is that the brain is a product of consciousness, not the other way around. However, in monistic idealism the brain is given its due as a most important aspect, as are all aspects of the world. Every aspect, including humans, comes from the same ground of being, and are all entangled in an extraordinary circular hierarchy that creates and complexifies our world in an ongoing process.
It's this tangled hierarchy of creativity that also provides, ironically, a sense of Self as a separate being in the world.
So you are consciousness, and you are a brain as well. Monistic idealism is elegant enough to contain and explain all of you.
What's it all about, Alfie?
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