Since /sci is perpetually confused about the nature of consciousness, I, a physicist, am here to redpill everyone on the true nature of consciousness. We don't know what consciousness is; But there is a necessary component of consciousness that one cannot ignore and that is self-awareness. Self-awareness is the property by which a perceptual system see's itself, updates itself, then again see's itself with a new perspective, updates itself again, ad infinitum, giving rise to a flow of time. This also explains why our experience of the universe is more akin to presentism rather than eternal block theory of the universe, because time is an illusion too. The only reason time exists, is because something changes, and that change is percieved. This kind of self perpetuating cycles are ubiquitous in nature, look at ecological cycles, recursive structures of neuronal processing, every process you can think of is a cyclical process. This also explains why the big bang happened, it had no choice but to happen; in a one shot universe where this is the first and only big bang that ever happened, no mathematical theory can sufficiently satisfy why that was the case, for something to come into existence, it must do so from a prior substance, and since substances in itself cannot morph, there should also exist a meta-principle governing the way substances morph, and that principle is necessarily cyclical in nature, or in other words, self-referential. There is another way to see this, think of strange loops from Hofstader's books: In order for a strange loop to exist, as shown in the picture above, it must rise above a dimension, giving rise to a 3rd dimension, to cause something in a lower dimension. Physics is consistent with this idea, as Bekenstein showed, that all information in our universe can be contained in a lower dimension, so the 3rd or 4th dimension just becomes another pseudo-dimension.