Brain and consciousness

I am taking a course this quarter for my upper division general education requirement called the brain and consciousness. After eight and a half weeks I am not sure that I have really learned anything. Don't get me wrong I have been presented with a lot of information and have even retained a good amount of what has been presented, I'm just not sure I have learned anything. Well in today's lecture the teacher provided us with a quote from G. Spencer Brown's The Laws of Form

• "Discoveries of any great moment in mathematics and other disciplines, once they are discovered, are seen to be extremely simple and obvious, and make everybody, including their discoverer, appear foolish for not having discovered them before. It is all too often forgotten that the ancient symbol for the prenascence of the world* is a fool, and that foolishness, being a divine state, is not a condition to be either proud or ashamed of.
  Unfortunately, we find systems of education today which have departed so far from the plain truth, that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance. This is doubly corrupt. It is corrupt not only because pride is in itself a mortal sin, but also because to teach pride in knowledge is to put up an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bonds imposed by one's ignorance.
  To any person prepared to enter with respect into the realm of his great and universal ignorance, the secrets of being will eventually unfold, and they will do so in measure according to his freedom from natural and indoctrinated shame in his respect of their revelation."

My teacher who might I add begins all his e-mails with yo, then summarized this as "If you know less at the end of this course than you knew at the beginning, then your understanding has grown." The sad fact is after I successfully pass this course all I am really going to ask myself is am I conscious now?