I have seen this idea pop up a few times and find it intriguing. I have read much better, but struggle to find links right now.
That said, this backgrounder / brief type piece should point you to the rabbit hole.
To me, in the most general sense, it's similar to the idea of the universe being cyclic, rather than having some definitive beginning and or end. It may just always be.
In this context, consciousness may be an emergent artifact of how living systems function, or maybe it's a thing of it's own, or... Who knows? I don't, but I consider basic branches of thought like this important, if nothing else to stimulate possible lines of thought easily passed by otherwise.
Thank you, I always had some thoughts in this direction, but never read about it somewhere else (never put time into it).
I definitely think there's a lot more beyond what we are able to sense or even grasp (if that's the appropriate word); in a similar fashion to these sort of Flatland examples, about how 2D beings are unable to grasp our 3D world, perhaps only slices of it at a time ...
What if consciousness is (or lives in) some sort of different dimension that we only get a glimpse of. What if, on that higher dimension, consciousness behaves like matter, has a definite structure, etc...
