Thanks for that.
We might also agree that belief/understanding that consciousness is emergent of the brain is a solely different mind [mind-set] than belief/understanding that consciousness is a ghost/spirit/soul/personality which can survive the death of the brain.
No, not different mind-sets, just different mental models (or narratives, or explanations; all the same thing) for describing and explaining our experiences.
To some learned and intelligent humans not all that long ago, the explanation for the sun was a fiery chariot drawn by fiery horses being driven across the sky by a god. Common sense told them that because the sun obviously moved, it had to be a moving thing, but unlike an animal or the wind it also moved in very regular patterns, so more likely an intelligently directed vehicle. And, though the movement appears slow to the eye, they understood that the extent of the sky is large, so the movement had to be fast to be completed from east to west in a day. The obvious choice was the fastest intelligently guided things they experienced, chariots. Common sense also told them that because the sun was bright and hot, it had to be made of the one other bright hot thing they knew of, fire. And common sense informed them that because no human being had the ability to make a chariot fly or survive the speed and heat if they did (there was a specific myth about the tragic fate of a mortal who tried to drive the sun chariot one time), the driver had to be a god. A male god, to be specific, because common sense told them that driving a chariot was a man's job, and because common sense also told them that the efficacy of the sun in making crops grow was similar to the effect of a male animal or human impregnating a female.
The people who chose this mental model weren't stupid. There's nothing wrong with applying common sense, as they did, when there's nothing else to go on, as there wasn't. Their model even got a few fundamental things right: for instance, the sun/fire being the direct source of rays (rather than, for instance, a hole in the sky allowing a beam of heat and light from some other realm to pass through) and that the movement involved had to be fast. Also, there was nothing in their world that required any better explanation, and nothing in their world that could have told them whether their fiery chariot explanation was true or false. (That last sentence is actually saying the same thing in two different ways.)
Of course, had they discussed the matter with certain Egyptians of similar eras, the latter would have disagreed with their solar narrative. "You Greeks don't get it, the solar disk
Himself is the one God. He has the properties He has because that's His divine nature. There's no need for godly fire and godly horses and godly chariots, those are just your own materialistic superstitions." Was the Egyptians' solar model then a better one? Not really, but like the Greeks' it was adequate for their needs, at least until a few years later when they decided it wasn't and massacred all the Aten worshippers. Sometimes competing mental models are serious business!
The Greeks seemed a bit more aware of the ways that their mental models of the natural world weren't actually all that good, in the sense of leaving a lot of questions unanswered and unanswerable, such as where the horses and chariot stop and rest if the earth, as they'd come to suspect, was actually spherical. This kind of dissatisfaction is reflected in e.g. Plato's allegory of the cave, and Socrates' supposed claim to know more only by virtue of knowing how little he knew.
I've lived through that experience myself, when I was very young. Some of my earliest memories are of trying to explain things like where the music played by an electric phonograph came from, concluding (based on my limited but completely common sense knowledge of how people make music) that there must be tiny musicians playing instruments and singing inside the box. At the same time I was fully aware that that was pretty much impossible for all sorts of reasons, but I didn't have any of the knowledge needed to come up with any better explanation. It was a frustrating situation. In the long run, the way to escape it is first to look inside the box, and second and more important, pay attention to what you find there. If you don't see any tiny musicians or tiny little musical instruments or any tiny little kitchens and bedrooms for the tiny musicians to eat and sleep in, but you do see parts connected by wires ultimately back to the power cord, then instead of concluding the tiny musicians must also be invisible (and need no food or sleep etc.), you'll arrive at better explanations, more useful mental models, if you start learning about electrical circuitry and how it works.
Note that even this simple and real-life example exhibits the tendency for mental models to diverge between materialistic and supernatural extremes. If one insists on holding to the tiny-musicians model of phonography, one can still arrive at a complete explanation for everything you observe and experience with phonographs. The tiny musicians, having proven by the lack of observable features to be invisible and intangible, become much like spirits; the record disk becomes a form of invocation that summons up the musician spirits from somewhere (the plane of music?) to perform the specified piece; the needle and tone arm communicate the ongoing invocation to the musician spirits; a scratch on the disk corrupts the invocation and angers the spirits causing them to make unpleasant popping noises or start repeating themselves; the electric power from the power cord is needed to transform the spirits' music into a form your mortal ears can hear; and so forth. Compare that with its materialistic counterpart: the phonograph converts the tiny undulations in the groove of the record (material) into isomorphic audible (material) sound waves in the air using (material) varying electrical currents and voltages flowing through (material) wires and components.
If you have an electric phonograph and some LPs and all you want to do is play them, either mental model is sufficient. If you want to invent, build, or repair a phonograph, however, the material model will serve you better.
Is that because the material model is true and the music-spirits model is false? Most people would say yes, but that's not really so. They're all just models. If your music spirit model were ever to become so detailed
and so well-tested against actual observations/experience that it could for instance correctly predict what readings would appear on a voltmeter or oscilloscope at any point in a phonograph's circuity under any given conditions, you actually could use it to build or repair or invent a phonograph. It would either be isomorphic with the theories behind analog electronics just renaming the terminology, or (far less likely but still conceptually possible) it would be an alternative theory that works just as well as (or even better than) electromagnetism, voltage, current, resistance, capacitance, phase, and so forth for understanding how to transduce sound using certain bits of material arranged in certain ways. But, note that you'll never reach either of those two conditions if your music spirit model gives up at "music spirits are tricky and capricious, who can ever tell what they'll do?" Which supernatural models tend to do. So as a matter of practicality, the material model
works better for inventing, building, or repairing analog phonographs.
In short, models are cognitive tools, not truths. Is a flat screwdriver any more or less true than a Philips head screwdriver? Of course not, but if you've got Philips head screws to drive, one of them is more useful.
Which is the better model of a tree, a big heavy near-stationary plant made mostly of wood, or a centuries-long current of almost entirely water (with only a relative few impurities like carbon and nitrogen also being present) from the ground into the atmosphere (a slow-motion lightning bolt of water)? Well, if you want to cut one down and build something out of it, or avoid driving into one, the first is probably better; but if you want to understand the effects of forests on the surrounding environment and climate in the long term, the second has a lot going for it. Note that to even grasp the second model, you have to be able to think in a whole different time scale and take into account different observations than what you directly see and experience day to day.
Adeptness with alternative models is the key to flexible, creative, and adaptive thinking; to personal resilience in life. (As certain occultists of my acquaintance like to say: "to know [only] one story [model] is death." Unfortunately most modern education systems don't teach or encourage such adeptness. Instead, one model is taught and then tested for, except in a few fields (such as philosophy or artistic movements) where multiple models are taught with the implication that because it cannot be determined which is true, the entire field is denigrated. Consequently, here you are today telling us that your one story is true and materialists' one story is false. "A whole different mind-set" for one model versus another is a lot like having a whole different workshop for your Philip's head screwdrivers versus your flat screwdrivers. Nope, you're better off having both ready to hand. Otherwise, you're only contributing to the pointless battle you've described. You speak of common ground, but you appear to be holding out for unconditional surrender.
(One example of people who, in the present day, are adept at creating and promoting alternative models, is advertisers. "Don't think of this car as a machine that gets you from one place to another, think of it as a symbol of freedom/a force that keeps you safe from harm/a path to a healthy environment/your well-deserved reward for your well-deserved success in life/your opportunity to dominate rivals." "Don't think of germs as microbes that you have to wipe away so they don't make you sick, think of them as an evil army bent on destroying your children that you must counter-attack with our bottle of heroic chemicals." If you fall for
their "one story" they can profit from it. Is it any surprise that those aforementioned occultists regard advertising as a form of black magic? Which, by the way, is itself an example of an alternative model that is sometimes actually useful.)
So, let's talk about models for the individual consciousness we all describe experiencing, and the role of the brain in those experiences. In your model, the brain can be described as either a vessel that holds/contains a portion of an ambient universal source of consciousness, or a receiver that tunes in like a radio to some such source of consciousness at a distance. (Perhaps a combination.) That was the predominant mental model of how consciousness happens in humans for most of human history (even going back as far as when other organs besides the brain, such as the heart, were considered the vessel or seat of consciousness). That's not, obviously, a bold new narrative based on recent scientific discoveries. It's the old favorite, long undisputed but now challenged by a materialist model in which consciousness arises as a result of the computational functioning of the brain.
By the way, that the individual consciousness can survive the death of the brain doesn't necessarily follow from the old model. Maybe the consciousness contained in the "vessel" disperses into heat or nothingness when the brain dies. Or the "transmission" turns off once the brain ceases receiving. (That would answer the question of what all the "transmitters" would otherwise have been pointlessly doing during the eons before human brains evolved.) Even the conceptual prospect of "merging back into the universal consciousness" after death doesn't really reassure survival in any meaningful sense. Socrates's atoms all still exist, having apparently merged back into the earth's collective matter, but we don't call
that condition "still alive," we call it "dead."
That's far enough for now. I'll leave it to you to point toward the common ground.
