As part of my life-long program of multifarious self-education, I recently found myself surfing the intertoobz reading about brain research. I am now prepared to share two important facts. First, there is a boatload of highly technical, in-depth information available to the public in the form of scientific research reports and articles. And second, the public is nowhere near bright enough to understand more than a very small fraction of that information. I'm actually interested in the material and I still only managed to slog through a few articles that required googling two or three words just to understand their titles. The articles themselves are now just a hellish blur because somewhere in there I lost consciousness and woke up with keyboard face and vague memories of dreams about monkeys.

Coincidentally, it was my thoughts on the evolution of consciousness that sent me on that little journey in the first place, and it wasn't entirely fruitless. Aside from the lesson in humility that I probably needed anyway, I learned that there is in fact a scientific consensus that our consciousness, our thoughts, memories and emotions reside in and are generated by the brain. I did not find any research directly stating this, but it can be easily inferred from the fact that all the research that I did find was directed at discovering not if, but how these processes occur in the brain.

My own theory is that man's immense capacity for lying to himself (i.e. religion) is tied directly to the evolution of our more powerful brain. I imagine that the first humans to evolve a mental capacity sufficient enough for a degree of self-awareness approaching what we now call consciousness were probably also the first mythologists. They woke up, so to speak, looked at the cold, indifferent world around them - a world over which they had virtually no control - and freaked right the fuck out. Self-awareness led immediately to self-deception as a defense mechanism against despair, belief providing an illusion of control over life and death. The more advanced portion of the brain playing tricks on the primitive brain stem in order to continue functioning in the face of - now fully realized - dangers all around.

Of course our modern mythologists continue the charade, denying the science and refusing to believe that our mind is part of our physical body. They believe instead in a soul which, upon the death of our body and brain, lives on, complete with our identity and memories and personality. By their logic, the brain appears to serve no purpose whatsoever.