I'm with the "consciousness is everywhere in the universe" camp.
Generally the claim that consciousness is in the brain comes from the scientific community. The claim that our consciousness is universal come from the spiritual/meditation community (which has said this for several thousand years). What I find really interesting is that scientists, which are the ones telling us we need empirical experiments, never bothered to look empirically at their own consciousness (through meditation). Wheras practically everyone from the mystical shcools through the ages who've made the effort to go into the deepest possible meditation (non-dual awareness) all say the same thing: Conscoiusness is universal, what we experience as being seperate is just an illusion. And you don't have to take their word for it - you can start meditating yourself and once you reach that deep state of consciousness you'll have your own experience of it that you can compare to theirs.
You can look at it this way:
Your brain is an organ for consciousness just as your eyes are organs for vision.
When you see the wall "over there", you're not really seeing the wall. What you're "seeing" is a bunch of photons hitting the rods and cones inside your eyes. This allows your brain to construct an image of the wall, giving you the illusion that your eyes are a "window" into the world. If you damage your eyes you can no longer see the wall - but that doesn't mean that the wall exists inside your eyes, they are just the organs that allows you to perceive the wall.
Likewise with the brain - its an organ that allows you to interface with conscoiusness (and probably some aspects of memory as well). You can think of your brain as a kind of radio receiver that tunes into consciousness just like a radio tunes into radio waves.
Here's a thought experiment:
Imagine we bring a radio (plus a very strong radio transmitter and lots of batteries) through a time-machine back to a scientist in the past who knows nothing about radios and radio waves. We then hide the transmitter and see what the scientist would conclude about a radio playing music:
- He can clearly hear the music is coming from the radio.
- He can't find anything connected to the radio.
- He can try to remove different parts of the radio which will either distort the music or completely shut it down. He could then conclude that he must somehow be damaging the music.
- He can check the weight of the radio before and after he destroys it and conclude that there's nothing beyond the physical radio there.
- He can look at the parts inside the radio and try to figure out what's going on. But since he has no knowledge of radio technology whatever he concludes will probably be way off.
- He can use all sorts of devices to measure the air surrounding the radio, but since he doesn't have any radio wave technology he will conclude there's nothing there.
- He could move the radio to a different location and observe that the radio works there as well, concluding the radio is clearly independant from its surroundings.
Based on the above he would probably conclude that the only explanation is that the music resides inside the radio and that it is not connected to anything else. He might descibe the radio as a "music generating machine". If we then tried to explain to him that the radio was picking up "invisible waves" that are present in the air at every location in the world he would probably think we're crazy and unscientific.
Of course the metaphor of the brain as a radio receiver is somewhat limited, but hopefully its useful to show how consciousness can be universal and exist "out there" while still being compatible with the experiements done by scientists on the brain.
Rasmus
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