The only "scientific" explanation that makes sense to me is that consciousness spans time and space, where each focal point of attention is an aspect of a central whole, like a lifetime within a fractal of lifetimes stemming from when source (God) consciousness fractured itself to experience every viewpoint within the universe to avoid an eternity alone. It created what we experience as the shared (objective) reality from the original singularity that came into existence from the number line via the long tail of the quantum probability distribution. The concept of something from nothing is maybe the foundation of consciousness itself, since science may never be able to explain the subjective experience of conscious awareness or how it came to be.

As a thought experiment, imagine we could emulate the corpus callosum between brain hemispheres through a computer chip, and had the medical technology to split someone in half. There have been cases where people have lost a brain hemisphere before birth or due to an accident but continued leading relatively normal lives, so we know that such a division is plausible.

Before separation, we'd experience being an individual.

At the moment of separation, our consciousness would anchor to one of the hemispheres we'll call "A". We'd see our other half "B" pull away and look back at us in curiosity as it continues experiencing its own consciousness. The other half B is still our consciousness, but anchored to a different point in spacetime. The halves would begin accruing their own memories independently, but act like the original individual for quite some time or even a lifetime.

At the moment of reunification, we'd see B approaching and then experience a download where our memories suddenly contain more than they did a moment ago. We might even experience "hearing" the other half as another person until the merging is complete. But afterwards we'd still be the same individual we always were, just with new narratives running in the code of our mental model, built from the memories acquired while separated. This experience is identical for the other half, except seen from its own context.

Warning (spoilers): This is analogous to a Vulcan mind meld, although it's unclear from Star Trek whether minds maintain their individuality or become a single consciousness. Because Spock's consciousness existed separately within McCoy until he was reincarnated, I tend to think that the show took the society of mind approach where our thoughts maybe come from a collection of simpler agents, meaning that Spock's anchor transferred to McCoy when they separated, so both their anchors shared one mind for a time, and Spock would have been in McCoy while he was asleep and his partial (a term borrowed from Eon by Greg Bear) B died in the warp chamber.

But I think the hemisphere splitting thought experiment is more useful because it sheds insight on reincarnation and the multiverse. It also helps us step up to 4D/5D and consider what it subjectively feels like to straddle realities as we shift laterally through spacetime rather than waiting for events to unfold in forward (linear) time. Insight and downloads might come from our consciousness constantly splitting and reuniting from other timelines as it explores possible future outcomes in the quantum probability distribution.

That might shed light on how the inner mind seemingly affects outer reality by overcoming the odds to survive via affecting probability itself (the principle of manifestation). In other words, it's likely that there is always an anchor, since quantum reality can't exist without an observer (consciousness), so an individual sees unlikely events whose odds of happening are so remote that science can only call them coincidences (synchronicities).

That would mean that our souls always continue, even if our physical bodies die, by straddling another reality where a body for us still exists. We may experience an infinite, continuous, individual timeline spanning countless lifetimes over billions of years, interspersed with long periods of nonexistence that we have no way to remember. And each time we die, the people around us can no longer be with us, since our anchor is no longer in their reality.

And it's unclear whether our soul can reincarnate in simpler life forms or if our complexity keeps evolving as our soul ascends. Dreams and psychedelic accounts seem to lean towards the idea of a lizard brain, where consciousness can exist unfiltered. So that it may be that we are allowed to "choose" our next incarnation during unconscious periods and "opt in" to a 3D experience like here on Earth to experience the novelty of suffering.

The main takeaway is that since those around us are aspects of ourselves, then egocentric narcisism is a refusal to see the big picture. If we act to enrich ourselves by exploiting others, we karmically doom ourselves to more suffering in our next life. Our old A becomes the resource-hoarding enemy of our new B. Making a deal with the devil may feel good, but it's like being the top inmate in a prison, starving the soul of real connection. So the meek and pious spiral out towards peace/connection/heaven while the rich and powerful spiral in towards their own violence/loneliness/hell.

I haven't read this, but I think it leans more towards the objective side, where multiple consciousnessness would occupy a single mind, more like schizophrenia than a fractal split from a single source consciousness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind

And of course all of this could be completely wrong. But it's all derived from first principles and a collection of insights from the spiritual community that seem to keep resonating and expanding in this post-pandemic era entering the New Age. We may not know until we meet aliens who have performed these experiments. But it provides a useful framework to explore the idea of consciousness existing in higher dimensions and even visiting us through the paranormal/supernatural (magical) experiences we all have as conscious aware beings.

Another benefit is that consciousness affecting probablity means that time travel is not possible, since any repeat scenario is a copy of the original and subject to random outcomes. The same events can never be replayed exactly the same way twice. Many vocal people in the scientific community have arrived at the conclusion that free will doesn't exist, which self-evidently defies our subjective experience, but they're basing that on the fallacy that time travel is possible.

The impossibility of time travel is maybe the best (albiet weak) explanation we have for consciousness and free will. It's how our timeless nature steps down from 4D/5D to experience a timeline, similarly to how a photon doesn't experience time since it's moving at the speed of light. There may only be one photon in the whole universe, creating a 4D holographic "crystal" encoding everything here. The mutable state of our consciousness is kind of like the in-between times when pure functional programming blocks to wait for new input, with the deterministic portion running unconsciously. An android would have mutable state, while a robot would mostly run hardcoded logic.

Which is why I don't subscribe to the idea that humans are just AIs running in complex robots, or that this is a simulation. Although if we substitute the word dream instead, then it all begins to make sense again. There's no matrix or holodeck that created the simulation, it's more like source consciousness projects the simulation to give us something to do. And of course there's no way to prove any of this, it's just a descriptive model that may lead to deeper insights.