Mind Over Matter?

[Mudhammam]

As far as I can see there are two possibilities of how consciousness relates to the brain:

1. That it is the mirror image of processing in the physical neural networks of the brain and is therefore superfluous. It could just as easily be there as not because all the 'calculations' are performed by the underlying physical hardware.
2. It is more of a 'black box' that is an actual processing element in the brain and therefore 'interfaces' with the physical hardware in some way. In its other plane of existence, whatever that may be, it can perform processing that cannot be achieved by the neural networks alone. In this idea if (some of) the neural networks of the brain were essentially relegated to the roles of input and memory only, their data would be 'set' by processing in this other plane and a hypothetical examination of the brain would show changes in value seemingly inexplicable.

I'd love to hear which, if any of these ideas people would think most likely, or of any other possibilities I haven't considered. I'm a hard determinist so I would lean towards the first one because the second is a bit more 'soul-like'. But I can't discount the second because the nature of our 'qualia' seems to only be useful if experienced as it is i.e. colour as a labelling system allows for pattern recognition in a way that I can't see any neural network being capable of - and I am very much interested in neuroscience and understand how neural networks work. To me it seems that purely physical evolution could only get so far with the processing of light based sensory data before it came to a dead end, one that consciousness might be able to overcome if number 2 was right. But then you come to the problem of how consciousness could 'evolve' if it was not entirely dependent on the brain, but that's for another day

I realise my number two might come across as an argument for the soul but it is not meant that way. The way I envisage the mind is essentially virtual reality software running in the supercomputer that is the brain. Therefore in some weird way it is not necessarily that the processing in that program is happening on another plane but rather that it has been abstracted away from the raw data in much the same way as a high level programming language abstracts away from the pure machine code - in the end machine code runs but  the high level, object orientated languages, give it an abstract and understandable meaning.

I would first make a distinction between some of these terms, something like the following:
Sensation - a supervening principle of neural networks; it is reducible to an inevitable functionality of certain physical objects when they interact in a specific manner. How an environment feels to, say, a worm, may be different than it does to a slug, both of which are in a class above say, a single-celled organism, which lacks any sensory input, but are obviously lower than something like a cat or a dog. There are probably slight differences between every animal, the more obvious separation, though, maintained between species.
Consciousness - an evolution of the processes described in the preceding definition, where neural networks have reached the point of development to be contained in their own central region, in a distinct organ, and often (though not necessarily) receiving the additional input of such features as vision and sound. 
Mind - A further development, per the unspecified principle(s) of organized material compositions, where conscious sensations are transposed to symbolic representations, enabling us to grasp our surroundings in an intelligible manner, e.g. the rational animal, man.
It would seem to me that consciousness and mind depend on the development of the brain, but that sensation precedes both. Colors enter the foray at the level of consciousness, whereas something like the following enters at the level of mind: 
Given my inability to formulate a coherent understanding of what abstract objects, such as the principle the above statement describes, are in relation to the material world, I might at this point take the route that only mind discovers reality (in part) as it truly is, and that is something both material and abstract (call it neutral monism).