The book deals with perhaps the most important question of the scientific and philosophical search of humanity, namely what is the relationship between the matter of the brain and the spirit and consciousness. With the continuous progress of neuroscience, more and more people are asking themselves questions such as: what happens to the material of our brain when we think or feel emotion? How does conscious experience arise from the physical processes that occur in the brain, a small amount of gelatinous material inside our skull?

Faced with an apparent difficulty in answering these fundamental questions, many people have wondered what approach philosophers and scientists offer. Philosophers have been preoccupied with two completely opposing theories regarding the nature of consciousness: the idealistic theory and the materialistic theory. The former considers consciousness as a quality inherent in humans, which, however, has dimensions beyond physical reality. The idealistic approach makes a clear distinction between the physical-material reality and the immaterial-spiritual reality, that is to say, between brain matter and spirit-soul.

In contrast, the materialistic theory treats consciousness as the result and product of the objective processing of environmental data by the matter of the brain. In our time, more and more scientists consider consciousness to be a natural-biological phenomenon, which we will fully understand only when we understand how the human brain works. According to the scientific approach, consciousness is a function of matter, when it has evolved to a very high degree of organization, and cognition is the expression of biochemical processes occurring in our brain, i.e., consciousness is a derivative of matter.

(. . .) [Excerpt from the text of the preface]