Consciousness: Is it seperate from the human body?

[Jenny A]

Sorry I'm just now catching up. I'm gonna try to make this a general response across the board:

No, it is what you call the mind that is both fooled, and in some cases knows it is being fulled. Your mind isn't a straight forward stream of rational thought. All kinds of things are going on in there at the same time.

I see what you mean. Maybe I should brush up on my neurology then lol. I was trying to touch on more of what Charles Sanders Pierce talks about when he discusses the "phaneron", "the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not." (wikipedia).

First of all, if you are going to quote, me attribute me.

The idea that the world, outside of our senses, may be radically different from the way we percieve it filtered through our brains. This to me, suggests that everything we know to be true or everything we can observe with our minds, could all be a universal illusion.

Could be theoretically, but I wouldn't act on that if I were you. The consequences appear to be deadly.

Seriously, there is no way to prove that the world we perceive is the actual world. But everyone except those who are insane acts as if it were absolutely the real world. This is a good example of the value of Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation with fewest assumptions is most likely correct. Although we don't see the world in all possible ways (we can't see radio waves, ultraviolet, etc. or see all of the world at once, or even all of it from earth) it introduces unnecessary complication to assume the we world perceive as filtered through are brains is an illusion even if we can speculate that there are parts of it we can't see as demonstrated by what we can additionally perceive through the use of tools.

Now connecting this to the idea of consciousness being seperate of the body; the reason I make these points is because if the case is that the only tools we have to understand the unvierse with are several pounds of meat we call a brain, is it better to think that we can fully understand the universe by these means, or to think that we are more than our brains?

You lost me here. The fact that we can't perceive it all through our senses as interpreted by our brains in no way suggests we are more than our brains. It simply shows that we are limited. We certainly don't understand the universe now. Thinking we are more than our brains won't help in that endeavor. Delusion is never helpful to understanding..

This is in some ways the great atheist/theist divide. I see no reason for assuming that because the universe vast and mysterious, that I and/or a god must be vast and mysterious.