system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Can someone explain how consciousness isn't a byproduct of brain activity?

I'm trying to understand the mind/body problem, and every explanation of it I read or listen to I end up thinking why an individual experience isn't more than complex neural activities. Emotions are hormones aren't they? also personalities can be changed with drugs that alter brain function, can't they? which would suggest we are just matter at the end of the day.

I'm not a sceptic, I'd love to be told for definite that consciousness is not produced by the brain but is in fact something else that sits in the brain. I hate the material-science answer of 'meh, complex brain' but I can't see another answer to that.

My interest in this stems from NDEs and the hope for something after death.

I suppose I need a good definition or example of what the mind/body problem is and why science hasn't answered it.

Can someone explain how consciousness *isn't* a byproduct of brain activity?
gpt
Well.. it's not per se the case that consciousness isn't the byproduct of brain activity, it's just so that we can't prove it is. 

Maybe this becomes clearer when you look at what philosophers call: "the hard problem (of consciousness)". This is the question of why we have experiences at all. It seems strange that adding pieces of matter together, which alone don't seem to be conscious, seems to generate consciousness. It's like putting a lot of marbles together and then expecting consciousness to arise. That would just seem weird.

We know that we are conscious and we know that brain processes influence our consciousness (our thoughts, feelings, etc.) and that hormones have a role in emotion. We can't however equal brain processes with consciousness nor can we equal hormones with emotions. Putting hormones into a glass doesn't mean there's feelings in a glass and simulating brain states in a computer doesn't mean that computer is conscious. There seems to be something over and above that which we can't quite grasp. Something primary. 

Now the mind-body problem is not about explaining which hormones and which brain states effect consciousness in what way. It's about explaining how consciousness and matter can interact. Take Descartes substance dualism. Descartes posited that matter is an extended substance whilst mind is an unextended substance. The question then arises how the two can interact. How is the mind connected to the body for instance if it is not extended? Is it situated in a part of the body, or in the whole body? If it is situated in just a part of the body, how can we have conscious awarenss in the rest of the body? And if it is situated in the whole, doesn't that mean that the mind is extended? Such questions are of importance for the mind-body problem.

Hope that helps.