It is popular to conflate the brain and mind although, wholly apart from scientific prompting, it is very obvious that consciousness must be immaterial. There is nothing about the concept of a mind that by necessity entails that it has a body. The very fact that there is no logical contradiction, such as God existing and not existing at the same time (each status excludes the other), in a mind apart from a corporeal shell alone already proves that they must be metaphysically distinct, whatever their casual relationship. Also, a fresh corpse differs from a live body in that it is inhabited by a consciousness. If I die, and my body still exists, it is the absence of my immaterial mind that makes the body a corpse. The body could still remain. A thought is regardless not a neuron; an embodied consciousness animates its body but could only be distinct from it.
None of this logically or even Biblically requires that there is an afterlife, or at least an immediate sort. Perhaps human or animal consciousness, for instance, only exists or perceives when it is integrated with its body and, as applicable, its respective nervous system (which is not consciousness but correlates with it). Indeed, this is actually what the Bible itself teaches: the dead are unconscious until a physical and phenomenological resurrection (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10, Job 3:11-19, Psalm 6:5, Daniel 12:2). Perhaps it is the case, though it does not philosophically have to be true and is in no way provable, that, while separate from the body, the mind is causally sustained by the body. Even then, though it would appear that the immaterial consciousness of a human with absolutely no correlating neurological function has died, other animals have wildly differing nervous systems.
Despite being omnivorous animals with teeth for eating algae or other creatures and behavioral reactions to stimuli, sea urchins, similar in the following regard to jellyfish and coral [1], lack a central nervous system, including a brain. They have neurons, but not a centralized mass of neurons like humans. They even have a nerve ring around the mouth like that of a starfish, another oceanic organism without a brain [2]. Along with many other animals, sea urchins live and act as if they are conscious despite having nervous systems that differ from the human kind to the point that some have neurons without a brain. Further removed from the human nervous system than urchins, in fact, sea sponges reportedly have no neurons whatsoever and yet are still living animals [3].
What this would mean, aside from what is already logically true by necessity about the nature of consciousness as aforementioned, is that even observation of other creatures very much points to a nervous system or a nervous system of a particular kind not being a requirement for the existence of an immaterial mind. The correlation between mind and body could be such that a mind like that of a human is only tied to a nervous system like that of a human--however, I could never know if other creatures are conscious or what their consciousness does not entail because I am neither those other creatures nor omniscient/telepathic. It is not just dogs and horses that act like they are conscious, though. Sea urchins eat, reproduce sexually, and live potentially up to a century or longer, and they have no brain, only neurons.
Only an utter fool would ever think science proves the existence or nature of other minds, or that it is science and not logic and introspection that prove truths about consciousness and one's own mental existence. Likewise, only an irrationalist would think that anything other than logical necessity and possibility is the core grounding of truth, and this includes those about consciousness. All the same, scientific evidence certainly suggests that a number of animals really do have their own immaterial minds--for a mind can only be immaterial even if it lives and dies because of its relationship to an arrangement of bodily matter--without a brain or, in the case of sea sponges, any nervous system. This plainly contradicts the unscientific (and more importantly, illogical) belief that only central nervous systems can produce minds. The mind is not the brain one way or another for reasons of logical necessity. Animal behaviors and neurology still pose a way to show that, even according to contemporary paradigms of neuroscience and biology, a mind would (as far as empirical observation makes it seem) not be identical to a brain anyway.
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