Hello Professor Booty,
If, by chance, you believe that real implies material, then I’m afraid you’ve left a good swath of the universe unaccounted for. Materialism is seen by many as an intellectual dinosaur these days. Most adherents of that old notion now speak in terms of physicalism; which, at a minimum, allows for particle/wave duality. Which is to say, not only is your brain constructed of more than tiny mass-bearing particles, the same goes for your liver. So well before we consider the “stuff” of mind, we already understand that the brain, as a biological organ, consists of more than an assemblage of Democritean atoma. The world appears to be far more interesting than that.
As for the stuff of mind, there is a well-known gedanken-experiment put forth by the Australian philosopher, Frank Jackson. It concerns an imaginary physicist named, Mary.
Mary was born and raised in a black-and-white room. She has never experienced color. But through her black-and-white books and television she has learned everything physical about the human mind that can be possibly known. She knows, for example, each nueral pattern for every mental state that a conscious human can experience.
But one day she is let out of her room. She steps out into the world and promptly notices a rose, and for the first time in her life she experiences color; the color red. “Amazing!” exclaims Mary. I knew everything there is to know about the human brain, and yet I did not know what it is like to have the experience of “red.” In other words, knowing everything about a brain does not tell you what it is like to possess a mind.
Or, as Thomas Nagel would say, “There is something it is like to be a bat,” (i.e., a flying mouse-like creature) that we could never know unless we were a bat. Human, or bat phenomenology isn’t reducible, respectively, to human or bat physiology.
As for the age-old, mind-body arguement, John Searle writes
"Dualism says that there are two kinds of phenomena in the world, the mental and the physical; materialism says that there is only one, the material. Dualism ends up with an impossible bifurcation of reality into two separate categories and thus makes it impossible to explain the relation between the mental and the physical. But materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness. In short, dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.
On the view that I am proposing, we should reject those categories altogether. We know enough about how the world works to know that consciousness is a biological phenomenon caused by brain processes and realized in the structure of the brain. It is irreducible not because it is ineffable or mysterious, but because it has a first person ontology, and therefore cannot be reduced to phenomena with a third person ontology. The traditional mistake that people have made in both science and philosophy has been to suppose that if we reject dualism, as I believe we must, then we have to embrace materialism. But on the view that I am putting forward, materialism is just as confused as dualism because it denies the existence of ontologically subjective consciousness in the first place." Consciousness
I can’t speak to whether Bergson is a worthwhile read, but I would point out that if you only read books that reaffirm what you already believe then you’re committing a form of intellectual incest. You can only learn ideas that you do not already believe. If you want to read Bergson, then read him - which is to say, fight him. Don’t allow anyone or any author to stuff ideas into your head without putting up a fight. Question everything. But keep reading.
Kind regards,
Michael