As humans we have two impulses in achieving understanding - analysis and synthesis. We like to take things apart and see how they work, but we also like to construct and build things too.
This is true in many walks of life but in particular it is true in philosophy. There are some philosophers who like to take the world apart and ask questions about what the various component parts might be, to look in detail at very specific areas and ask very detailed questions about some particular aspect of the world. There are also philosophers who want to try to construct some Big Picture of Everything, to create some world view in which everything has a place, and it all fits together in some meaningful and balanced way.
Looking back over the history of humanity and where we are today, it is clear that mind or consciousness has become a pivotal area of trying to understand who we are and what the universe means.
Today the common view is that most of the universe is non-conscious, and that consciousness exists only - as far as we know - in the heads of a few living creatures on planet earth. Of course it is possible through evolution that other planets will also have evolved creatures similar to ourselves, but this is just speculation.
The difference between consciousness and the non-consciousness universe is that only with minds and consciousness do we have meaning, purpose, intention and value. If minds only inhabit evolved physical beings billions of years after the universe started, then the universe itself has no purpose or meaning. It is just a lot of non-conscious matter following deterministic laws.
Meaning, purpose, value, goodness, beauty, happiness are just states of mind that exist in the heads of humans and creatures like ourselves.
Clearly such a view is very different to that held historically by many cultures - whether in the east with ideas of reincarnation and cycles of life, or in the west with ideas of God, the gods, or other cultures who believe in spirits, ancestors and other non-human forms of consciousness and mind.
Were all these cultures wrong in believing other minds existed which ordered the universe and gave meaning and purpose to it?
Even today some people question how such a complex universe could have appeared without some form of planning, design or purpose - the universe appears to be "fine tuned" to permit life to evolve. Evolution isn't just the random rearrangement of simple configurations of elements but appears able to create increasingly complex structures - how was the universe able through random, meaningless chance and a few simple basic elements able to contain within it the possibility of life, or DNA, even of conscious thought?
The answer is we just have to try to make sense of all the conflicting evidence and try to decide for ourselves whether there are other minds in the universe. There is so much we don't know even about the current universe - what is dark matter and dark energy, which appears to fill most of the universe and about which we know almost nothing?
All anyone can do is investigate all they can, learn all they can, and try to decide what makes most sense to them. Whether they choose a religious path or agnostic or atheist, there is no overwhelming evidence for any particular view, we just need to do the best we can and be respectful of others who have taken a different view to ourselves.
A few final thoughts.
Sometimes people use the argument from evil to question whether a good God could have created a universe with so much built-in suffering. I believe a better question to ask is if you had the choice to say if this universe should exist or if it would have been better it was never created, what would you say? I think most people would say it is better it exists. In spite of all the pain and suffering the world and the universe are amazing so if there was some creative mind that set up the parameters of the universe, even if it wasn't all knowing and all powerful, it was at least good enough to decide that the universe should exist after all.
In theory it is possible to confirm if other minds exist apart from our own, or even if it is possible for the mind to exist apart from the body - if we were able to get genuine scientific information from some other god or spirit or if someone was able to leave their body and report on what they had seen, this would surely confirm the existence of non-material minds. The fact that this has not occurred at least for now means there is nothing conclusive about minds other than our own, but that doesn't mean they aren't possible.
Confirming the existence of other minds complicates the scientific process of verification. If I get hungry and go and buy a snack, there is no measurable material cause that caused my movement - there is no billiard ball process to map cause and effect. Things happened just because I willed myself to do something, although of course there was also a material correlation within my neurological circuitry. All science can do is map material causes it can't map mental causes because they require self-reporting from the conscious person - so if things were happening in the material world as a result of a non-material mind, science couldn't detect it, it could only detect the correlating material processes.
Although I have been using "non-conscious" and "material" somewhat interchangeably in fact what the universe actually consists of is very much an open question. Quantum Mechanics has mathematical equations that model the behaviour of sub-atomic entities, but has no insight into what the subatomic world actually consists of. What appears to be happening however certainly breaks all the "rules" of the physical world around us. This has led some Quantum Physicists such as David Bohm to speculate that our consciousness might actually be connecting with some non-material part of the universe. What he calls the "implicate order" is some eternal realm existing within all of time and space, when we look up at the night sky, the darkness is actually full of this "implicate order" and it is constantly interacting with the visible "explicate order" that we experience all around us.
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