Do we have souls?

[GliderGuider]

184. What does "see beyond brain chemistry" mean?

I don't think anyone understands the action of hallucinogens on the brain in terms of their effects on consciousness. The research was shut down too fast. What we're left with as a result is subjective reports.

To turn the question back, how does even normal brain function allow us to see "beyond brain chemistry" in terms of creating ordinary consciousness? In other words, what is consciousness, and where does it come from? The attempted explanations I've seen so far are pretty simplistic and don't address those root questions.

The manipulation of consciousness is a bit of an unsolved riddle in anesthesia, for example - we know how to do it, but we still don't know why it works:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/322/5903/876.abstract
[div class="excerpt" style="border:solid 1px #000000"]Abstract

When we are anesthetized, we expect consciousness to vanish. But does it always? Although anesthesia undoubtedly induces unresponsiveness and amnesia, the extent to which it causes unconsciousness is harder to establish. For instance, certain anesthetics act on areas of the brain's cortex near the midline and abolish behavioral responsiveness, but not necessarily consciousness. Unconsciousness is likely to ensue when a complex of brain regions in the posterior parietal area is inactivated. Consciousness vanishes when anesthetics produce functional disconnection in this posterior complex, interrupting cortical communication and causing a loss of integration; or when they lead to bistable, stereotypic responses, causing a loss of information capacity. Thus, anesthetics seem to cause unconsciousness when they block the brain's ability to integrate information.
It's a long way from being able to disrupt consciousness temporarily to explaining the subjective effects of hallucinogens like LSD. If we don't even know (yet) where normal consciousness comes from, it's unlikely anyone would be able to answer your question about altered consciousness.