Why Neuroscience Has Consciousness Completely Backward

Consciousness is not a byproduct of brain activity.

Science holds that thoughts are reducible to neural activity, that awareness is a chemical phenomenon, that personality is biological in origin, and that consciousness itself emerges as a product of electrical signaling within approximately three pounds of biological tissue.

This assumption is rarely subjected to scrutiny, though cracks are beginning to form, even among scientists.

It is taught in educational institutions, reinforced within medical frameworks, accepted as axiomatic in psychology, and embedded as a foundational premise of neuroscience.

From it emerges a distinctly modern conception of identity: you are your body, or more precisely, you are your brain.

On the surface, this position appears defensible. Brain damage can produce measurable changes in personality. Electrical stimulation of specific cortical regions can elicit memories or sensations. Neuroimaging consistently reveals patterns of neural activity that correlate with distinct emotional and cognitive states.

The inference appears logical: the brain generates consciousness.

Correlation is not causation, however.

Modern science is systematically confusing the products of consciousness for consciousness itself. As a result, civilization’s entire framework for understanding identity, mortality, psychology, and who we really are rests upon a foundational error with sweeping consequences.

The central confusion of modern science lies in its confusing of the body’s sensory and cognitive processes with consciousness itself.

This mistake is inevitable given science’s methodological process of arriving at conclusions—the scientific method. Scientific inquiry is confined to what can be measured.

Neuroimaging instruments detect electrical activity. Researchers observe chemical signaling, patterns of neural excitation, synaptic transmission, regional blood flow, and electrical impulses.

In short, science measures the movement of effect.

But Consciousness, properly understood from a mystic’s point of view, is not movement.

Thought is not Consciousness. Sensation is not Consciousness. Electrical activity is not Consciousness. The aforementioned are the products extending from Consciousness, not Consciousness itself.

A book cannot be the author of itself and the sculpture is not the sculptor.

Our understanding of consciousness requires a reversal of foundational assumptions.

Rather than Consciousness emerging from matter, matter emerges from Mind of which consciousness is a quality.

Modern civilization has conditioned human beings to identify with the body as the self, rather than with the immortally still Conscious-Mind that centers and governs every thought and action extending from it. Neuroscience’s classification is understandable, because human beings are deeply embedded in sensory experience. The body feels immediate sensations, pain feels undeniably real, thought feels personal, and memory feels permanent.

Yet even within ordinary experience, phenomena exist that quietly challenge this materialist picture.

Throughout history, geniuses and mystics across cultures have consistently described states in which Mind-awareness expanded precisely as body-awareness receded—the most recent example being Walter Russell.

“Be still. Stillness reveals the secrets of eternity.”
― Lao Tzu

This presents a serious challenge to strict adherents of materialism because they can’t explain genius or the creative process.

What is the function of the brain?

The brain functions as an instrument through which an omnipresent consciousness operates, and the body as a servant of that instrument.

The most immediate objection arises: if consciousness is independent of the brain, why does brain damage alter personality?

The answer is simpler than commonly supposed.

A damaged instrument distorts its ability to express the thoughts of its player. It does not destroy the source of those thoughts.

Like a damaged lens or compromised reel of film, the projected image may be distorted—but the light of the cinema projector endures and remains unchanged.

Brain damage affects the instrument through which Conscious-Mind expresses itself. It disrupts transmission, alters memory retrieval, impairs interpretation, and modifies behavior.

The alteration of the instrument does not entail destruction of Consciousness itself.

A parallel confusion appears in contemporary discussions of artificial intelligence.

Can AI become conscious?

AI can process information, generate language, identify patterns, and simulate reasoning with remarkable sophistication. But computation and the regurgitation of already existent information is not Mind-Awareness. It also is mistaken that AI has intelligence, after all, its right there in the name. It is not intelligent, however; it merely synthesizes the previously written products of the human Mind which are in themselves simulations or expressions of Mind-Idea.

Again it must be stated: Intelligence is a Mind-Quality. Consciousness is Mind-Awareness of its Qualities. The greater the Intelligence, the greater the Consciousness.

It must always be remembered that Mind-qualities are eternally still and unchanging. The only thing which changes is the THOUGHT POTENTAIL which surrounds an unchanging Consciousness and Intelligence—see the AXIOM above.

Science, despite its extraordinary achievements, confronts a limitation it rarely acknowledges explicitly: it cannot measure Consciousness directly, because Consciousness is dimensionless and still.

Science can only measure the products of Consciousness—brain activity—which are recordings of sensation and recordings of thought.

If the materialist account of Consciousness is fundamentally inverted and corrected, the implications will extend across every domain of human existence, starting with who we are.

YOU are not your body. YOU are not chemistry. YOU are not neurons firing in predictable configurations.

YOU are Conscious-Mind expressing yourSELF in Thought through the instrument of your body.

This will reframe civilization’s concept of death. If Consciousness is not generated by the body, then the destruction of the body does not entail the destruction of Consciousness—YOU ARE IMMORTAL.

There is no Life IN our body. What is meant by this?

The body is composed of light-waves which compress into atoms. Atoms are 99.999% empty space. About 96% of the human body's mass is composed of just four elements: oxygen (about 65%), carbon (18%), hydrogen (10%), and nitrogen (3%).

If you were to squeeze out all of the space from your atoms leaving only the electric wave particles known as protons and electrons, you would need a microscope to find your body which would appear as a residue of carbon.

For LIFE itself is an immortal Mind-Quality which the body SIMULATES.

The masses constantly repeat sayings such as—God is life—without any true meaning of what it really means.

The lens may crack; the film may burn, but LIGHT, LIFE and CONSCIOUSNESS remain.

This new perspective will reframe the institutions of Science and its opposite mate of Religion. The study of consciousness would no longer be an attempt to manufacture awareness out of matter, but an investigation into Cause itself, for which we simply term—God.

The great contemplative religious traditions which have leveraged meditation have not been engaged in an escape from reality.

They have been perceiving Reality.

The deepest misunderstanding of our modern technological civilization is that we have mistaken the instrument for the player, the projection on the screen for its light source and the Effect for the Cause.

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Michael Post, Creator of Beyond the Cosmic Veil