You would have to be remarkably resistant to brainwashing to resist the claim — endlessly repeated — that we are our brains. The notion that our consciousness, the self to which the successive moments of consciousness are attributed, our personality, our character, personhood itself, are identified with activity in our brains is so widely received that it seems downright eccentric to profess otherwise.
—Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind (h/t John C. Wright and Mark Anthony Signorelli)
***
One of the fundamental errors of modernity — perhaps the fundamental error — is to turn the cosmos upside-down, and imagine that consciousness is somehow built from bricks of inconscience — that mind is actually mindless, that the secret of life is lifelessness, and that Spirit is just instinct or random error on a grand scale.
But if we properly view the cosmos right-side up, then things like truth, freedom, life, light, and love are at the top; truly, it is a tree with roots aloft and branches down below. —Bob
***
We’ve often been told that our minds are just the workings of extremely complicated minerals. But really, it’s the case that minerals are just extremely simplified mind. Meaning is not nowhere. It’s everywhere… that’s why it’s so easy to miss it. That’s why we moderns have been able to construct an entire worldview where it is, essentially, 100% absent.
Well, I shouldn’t say “easy to miss.” It’s actually remarkably hard to miss meaning and purpose. It’s an act of willful blindness and childish stupidity, and it took modern man a lot of time and effort to arrive at this stage. But, once arrived, we can easily coast along with our eyes glued shut. The decades can just fly by.
Out of Sleep 
Have you seen The Quantum Activist? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1397093/ The Professor arrives at this same conclusion by examining some well-known paradoxes of quantum physics.
No, though Netflix keeps recommending it to me. That’s what I get for watching “Contact” and also “A Man For All Seasons.” It’s got me pegged as a guy who likes science fiction and stories about religious belief.
“I believe in ghosts too.”
Now John and Sylvia look at me peculiarly. I see I’m not going to get out of this one easily and brace myself for a long explanation.
“It’s completely natural,” I say, “to think of Europeans who believed in ghosts or Indians who believed in ghosts as ignorant. The scientific point of view has wiped out every other view to a point where they all seem primitive, so that if a person today talks about ghosts or spirits he is considered ignorant or maybe nutty. It’s just all but completely impossible to imagine a world where ghosts can actually exist.”
John nods affirmatively and I continue.
“My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn’t that superior. IQs aren’t that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.”
“What?”
“Oh, the laws of physics and of logic — the number system — the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.
“They seem real to me,” John says.
“I don’t get it,” says Chris.
So I go on. “For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.”
“Of course.”
“So when did this law start? Has it always existed?”
John is frowning, wondering what I am getting at.
“What I’m driving at,” I say, “is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed.”
“Sure.”
“Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone’s mind because there wasn’t anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not anywhere…this law of gravity still existed?”
Now John seems not so sure.
“If that law of gravity existed,” I say, “I honestly don’t know what a thing has to do to be nonexistent. It seems to me that law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that that law of gravity didn’t have. Or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. And yet it is still `common sense’ to believe that it existed.”
John says, “I guess I’d have to think about it.”
“Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense.
“And what that means,” I say before he can interrupt, “and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It’s a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.”
“Why does everybody believe in the law of gravity then?”
“Mass hypnosis. In a very orthodox form known as `education.”‘
“You mean the teacher is hypnotizing the kids into believing the law of gravity?”
“Sure.”
“That’s absurd.”
“You’ve heard of the importance of eye contact in the classroom? Every educationist emphasizes it. No educationist explains it.”
John shakes his head and pours me another drink. He puts his hand over his mouth and in a mock aside says to Sylvia, “You know, most of the time he seems like such a normal guy.”
I counter, “That’s the first normal thing I’ve said in weeks. The rest of the time I’m feigning twentieth-
century lunacy just like you are. So as not to draw attention to myself.
“But I’ll repeat it for you,” I say. “We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he was born and that magically he discovered these words. They were always there, even when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and then they applied to it. In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world. That, John, is ridiculous.
“The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don’t get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It’s that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, it’s just that that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either.”
They are just looking at me so I continue: “Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.”
-Pirsig, Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance