Understanding Physical Processes in Describing a State of Consciousness: A Review

TL;DR

This review explores the physical processes linked to consciousness, including neural signals, quantum phenomena, and information integration, aiming to clarify its nature and address fundamental scientific questions.

Contribution

It synthesizes current theories on consciousness involving physical, quantum, and informational aspects, proposing directions for future research to deepen understanding.

Findings

Consciousness is associated with neural signal transmission and quantum processes.

Integrated information plays a key role in understanding consciousness.

Structural and universal aspects of matter are relevant to consciousness studies.

Abstract

The way we view the reality of nature, including ourselves, depend on consciousness.It also defines the identity of the person, since we know people in terms of their experiences. In general, consciousness defines human existence in this universe. Furthermore, consciousness is associated with the most debated problems in physics such as the notion of observation, observer,in the measurement problem. However,its nature, occurrence mechanism in the brain and the definite universal locality of the consciousness are not clearly known. Due to this consciousness is considered asan essential unresolved scientific problem of the current era.Here, we review the physical processes which are associated in tackling these challenges. Firstly, we discuss the association of consciousness with transmission of signals in the brain, chain of events, quantum phenomena process and integrated information. We also highlight the roles of structure of matter,field, and the concept of universality towards understanding consciousness. Finally, we propose further studies for achieving better understanding of consciousness.