is consciousness a fundamental aspect of reality?

The Brain as Doorway, Not Creator: McGilchrist's Radical Take on Consciousness

Your brain might be less a generator of consciousness and more its translator—a proposition that upends decades of materialist neuroscience orthodoxy while offering an escape hatch from its explanatory dead ends.

As our technological capabilities to map neural activity expand exponentially, the limitations of purely materialist theories of mind become increasingly glaring. McGilchrist, leveraging both his neuroscientific expertise and philosophical acumen, distinguishes sharply between "data" (what materialists measure) and "information" (what consciousness actually processes), arguing that the brain functions more as a "transmitter" of a potentially universal consciousness rather than its manufacturer. The evidence? Patients with hydranencephaly—essentially no cerebral cortex—who nonetheless respond to music and recognize faces, and the puzzling phenomenon of terminal lucidity, where dementia patients experience sudden mental clarity shortly before death.

"A madman is not somebody who's lost his reason—he's lost everything but his reason," McGilchrist notes, illuminating how even delusions follow logical pathways through damaged brains. His most provocative challenge to physicalists cuts deepest: "Where in the brain are the things that make life worth living?" he asks, calling materialists "some of the most gullible people alive" for their faith that neurons alone could generate the richness of subjective experience. This conversation isn't merely academic—it's about whether consciousness is an emergent property of matter or something far more fundamental to reality itself.