Does consciousness take place outside the human brain?

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Hi, thanks for the A2A. You have to get through the semantics of this question before you can approach a realistic answer. What does it mean for something to have consciousness? To me this can refer to two things.

One, the hard-to-divine ‘program’ that runs on top of brain function and mind patterns. It’s hard to imagine this actually existing outside of a brain, but when you escape the prison of materialism and entertain spiritual realities, it’s actually not that hard to envision. It’s just that because those spiritual realities only have a loose connection with physical realities, and the contact point is our minds themselves, they can’t be rigorously tested, meaning evidence is impossible to find.

The other sense of the word can simply mean ‘self-organization’. One can abstract over ‘all of evolution’ to arrive at a conception of consciousness that simply means “undirected goal achievement.” Which is a hard statement to grok but it’s the only way in which life could have been created at all. When you start to talk about ‘reasons’ why creatures evolved certain things, you’re pointing at an agent that doesn’t actually exist anywhere but in the vagaries of math equations.

Which is precisely the same way that we exist. If you study brain activity, it’s impossible to deduce from that activity that there’s self-awareness going on in there, and you certainly can’t tell whatever it is the person is actually thinking. We have a term for human deduction about what others are thinking, theory of mind. It involves many other parts of our brain including our emotional complexes. What we call empathy is critical for ascertaining what other rational beings are thinking, nowhere does it involve anything we’d call logic or rationality.

That tangent aside, this complex of thought and subjective experience, what we call consciousness, is surprisingly malleable, we can disconnect the senses from its functioning, to produce dream-like experiences. It’s shockingly easy to imagine how it can be separated from the actual body that it’s residing in.

It’s also not too hard to think of it in terms of the other sense in which one can think of consciousness, as undirected self-organization. One can even think of the process of ‘awakening’ as going from undirected self-organization to directed self-organization as mental faculties come online. Even a spiritual awakening functions with the same broad strokes.

So while it not be the hard ‘evidence’ that would convince a hardcore materialist skeptic, it’s the beginnings of a way in which to rationally consider extra-bodily consciousness.