Consciousness is fundamental to reality. Science-based thinking (but not science itself) has put matter as the fundamental element but actually has never been able to prove it. To be able to prove that matter gives rise to consciousness, you’d have to step out of consciousness and point to matter. Which you cannot do. Not talking about individual consciousness where you can just point at someone’s brain: that experience of pointing at someone’s brain is happening inside consciousness, how else would you know about it.

Not to be confused with Solipsism, that’s the thinking mind. I’m talking about Idealism, the raw state of pure experience before thought.

This is actually an implication on one of the worlds leading theory of consciousness, Integrated Information Theory. It gives a mathematical measure of consciousness (as integrated information) and one of the surprising implications of that is that theres actually no matter that has zero integrated information. If we use this metric to measure human consciousness the implication is that a rock, say, has a small amount of consciousness.

Of course this theory is not without its issues, and I don’t personally subscribe to it, but I think it goes to show you that we all need to be more open minded to alternative possibilities to the typical “consciousness is just neurons firing” view. We don’t actually understand consciousness well enough to be jumping to that conclusion yet.