I'm talking about two ways to study consciousness: by process or by location. Studying consciousness by process means looking at how it works — how we think, feel, become aware, and respond to the world. It focuses on what the mind does and how different mental functions happen. On the other hand, studying consciousness by location means trying to find out which parts of the brain are responsible for these actions. It’s more about where in the brain consciousness happens. So, the main idea is whether we should understand consciousness by what it does or by where it happens in the brain.

Your question seems to assume that consciousness is a materialistic process. However, should it be a quantum process, your question makes no sense. Given what we know of consciousness, that certain quantum phenomena (minute electrical impulses) are received in the brain via neurons from one part of the body or another, with no ability to distinguish them without knowing their point of origin, and are somehow converted into qualia or experiences, associated with specific parts of the body, we have a "black box" problem and no clear evidence that materialism can answer the question of "how".

Tor reiterate: There have been two approaches to the study of the neural basis of consciousness: first, tracking down its location in the brain, and second, treating it as a biological process.  Many neuroscientists have been in favor of deducing the location of consciousness.  A recent example of this is using a plethora of correlational methods to seat consciousness either in the frontal lobes or within the parieto-temporal junction, a surmise based on forty-one collaborators working at thirty-one different institutions (Ferrante et al. 2023).  Contrary to this view, electrical stimulation of thousands of sites in the brain failed to create the impression in human subjects that they were directing the evoked percept or movement through their consciousness (Penfield 1975).  In fact, the only sites in the brain that have absolute control over the musculature are brain stem and spinal cord nuclei that directly innervate the muscles, and stimulation of such nuclei is always perceived as being well beyond conscious control (Tehovnik and Slocum 2004), which is not that different from our lack of control over spinal cord reflexes. 

That consciousness is a ‘process’ was well-appreciated by William James (1890), who coined the term ‘stream of consciousness’.  The ‘stream of consciousness’ depends on neocortical-cerebellar loops (that collectively account for over 95% of the neurons of the brain) which convert conscious actions into automatic actions, such as generating automated speech of a particular language.  In the following discourse (Tehovnik, Hasanbegovic, and Chen, 2025, Consciousness & Automaticity: The Storage and Transfer of Information, submitted) we argue that three regions of the brain, the neocortex, the hippocampus, and the cerebellum are linked to create the transition between consciousness (which is utilized for learning, Hebb 1949, 1968), and the automatic execution of behavior.  In short, consciousness is a biological process whose understanding was started by William James over one hundred years ago and this understanding can only be advanced through studies of systems neuroscience.  The three authors of this discourse are experts in systems neuroscience as it pertains to the neocortex, the hippocampus, and the cerebellum.

Yes, we propose a biological (rather than a spiritual) model of the process of consciousness, which should be useful to those (e.g., Meta's Yann LeCun) who create systems based on artificial intelligence, whose robustness scales with amount of information.