Subject: Re: OT: what does an expanding universe mean?
What you say you learned is what ONE school of thought says regarding the so-called "hard" problem of consciousness. That a complex brain creates/produces/causes consciousness, that it's a by-product. But actually this is a very open and heavily discussed field of not only philosophers but equally of neuroscientists.

How about Boltzmann Brains?

Wikipedia: The Boltzmann brain thought experiment suggests that it might be more likely for a single brain to spontaneously form in a void, complete with a memory of having existed in our universe, rather than for the entire universe to come about in the manner cosmologists think it actually did. Physicists use the Boltzmann brain thought experiment as a reductio ad absurdum argument for evaluating competing scientific theories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...