Brain
“Although physical processes in the brain are relevant to mental processes, it still cannot be assumed that these physical processes are sufficient to explain mental phenomena.” — Werner Heisenberg
What is consciousness? We are told that it is a product of the brain. What is the brain? We are told it is the “matter” inside the head. However, since the only empirical reality that is ever directly given to us is the reality of phenomenal consciousness, every experience, including the experience of the “matter” inside the head (as well as the experience of the head itself and the body as a whole) and the experience of any scientific observations of that “matter” that we may have, is a phenomenal experience — the experience of phenomenal consciousness; therefore, the idea that consciousness is a product of the empirical (phenomenal) brain is an absurd recursion that reduces phenomenal consciousness to a phenomenon of consciousness.
“The main challenge … is not how we can epistemically get out of the brain, but how we could possibly get into it in the first place. How do we know at all that there really is a brain?” — Dan Zahavi
We may be told that the real brain is not the empirical (phenomenal) brain, but the physical brain, which is transcendent to phenomenal consciousness, that is, never given empirically — never given as such in experience. Does this idea explain consciousness scientifically? No, because the transcendent is not the subject matter of science (which deals exclusively with empirical phenomena, mathematical descriptions of their “nature” and predictions of empirical processes on the basis of these descriptions/models), but of metaphysical speculations, and hence the “physical” exists only in our imagination as a highly problematic (given the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness) pseudoscientific metaphysics of materialism/physicalism with its reductionist neuromythology.
From the perspective of a much less problematic and much more conceptually parsimonious ontological idealism (consciousness-only ontology), the myth of the “physical” was born of blindness primarily to the transcendental* dimension of consciousness, viz. transcendental intersubjectivity, which constitutes/projects the “real” world of intersubjective phenomena, including the empirical brain, which is nothing but the form in which certain processes of one’s transcendental subjectivity are constituted phenomenally by our nexus of transcendental intersubjectivity.
“[Transcendental phenomenology is] a beginning philosophy that grows and branches out into particular objective sciences.” — Edmund Husserl
“[The purpose of scientific theories] is not to disclose the real essence of phenomena but only to track down, so far as it is possible, relations between the manifold aspects of [phenomenal] experience.” — Niels Bohr
The true meaning of physics is that it produces mathematical descriptions of the elementary causal structures of transcendental intersubjectivity that constitutes the “real” world of intersubjective phenomena, including all scientific observations.
“What do we actually accomplish through [physics]? Nothing but prediction extended to infinity.” — Edmund Husserl
The true meaning of neuroscience is that it produces descriptions of correlations between particular subjective phenomenal processes (e.g., emotions) and particular processes of the intersubjective phenomenon “brain” (empirical brain).
“The whole problem of neuroscience … is how to connect brain activity with consciousness, and all we can say in general is that these processes are running in parallel.” — Oliver Sacks**
We must not confuse science with the metaphysical materialists/physicalists in science and their metaphysical myths about the existence of “physical matter” in general, the “physical brain” in particular, and the localization of phenomenal consciousness in the latter. These metaphysical fantasies have nothing to do with science proper.
If ontological idealism is indeed less problematic and more conceptually parsimonious than materialism/physicalism, why is it rejected by most philosophers and scientists in our time?
Idealism leads us to the question of what consciousness-in-itself is — to the mystery of the transcendent, and given the millennia of mysticism (transpersonal experience of the transcendent) — to the mystery of Transcendence, whereas the pseudoscientific metaphysical mythology of materialism/physicalism is first of all a reaction to religious mythology, and the problem of its fanatical supporters is that together with the “bathwater” of naive religious myths they throw out Transcendence and stubbornly refuse to return to the path of faith, now purely philosophical.
The truth of idealism is rejected not because idealism is unscientific (in fact it is more “scientific” than materialism/physicalism and other erroneous ontologies that introduce “physical matter” into the ontological equation and thereby violate Occam’s razor principle, since idealism allows us to explain scientific data with incomparable consistency and conceptual parsimony), but because of Transcendence: Those who have never transcended their individual existence into the supraindividual Light can only have faith in Transcendence, which most of our contemporaries are incapable of, for faith in Transcendence stands in the way of their egoistic self-will, which wants God to stay dead. Kali Yuga.
“How great a friend [the concept of] material substance has been to atheists in all ages were needless to relate. All their monstrous systems have so visible and necessary a dependence on it that, when this corner-stone is once removed, the whole fabric cannot choose but fall to the ground, insomuch that it is no longer worth while to bestow a particular consideration on the absurdities of every wretched sect of atheists.” — George Berkeley
“Materialists employ all manner of expressions, arguments, metaphors, and embellishments to attract and deceive foolish people. … It will only be in the final five hundred years of later ages that [materialists] will create schisms and their mistaken views of causation will flourish and be accepted by false disciples.” — Laṅkāvatārasūtra
*) The notion of Kantian and Husserlian transcendental idealism/phenomenology in which Yogācāra transcendental and ontological idealism is partially rediscovered.
**) Translated from Russian
