Do you consider consciousness purely physical or something metaphysical? What is your reasoning behind it?

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Consciousness is not a physical object. Full stop.

Easiest analogy to make here is a running computer program. I’m not saying that we are running computer programs, but the analogy should properly illustrate how things that are non-physical can have effects on the world anyway.

How do you understand what a running computer program is actually doing? How can you understand what a car’s engine does? Well you can do what scientists call empirical analysis on the moving parts of the engine. This will give you a rough picture of what all those moving parts are doing and their designed purpose. You can simply watch a water wheel milling grain to see how it works.

This will not help you, at all, with the operation of a computer program. If you put a multimeter or oscilloscope on what you determine to be the ‘brains’ of the computer system, the CPU, without which the computer cannot run, then you will learn exactly fuckall. You can work out simple electronic circuits by observing voltage and current levels, but the sheer amount of context makes doing the same with modern hardware hopeless.

How do you find out what the program is doing? You have to look somewhere where the actual running of the program isn’t. You have to look at a representation of the behavior.

You have to look at the source code. This is the hallmark of the non-physical, when the rules of operation cannot be ascertained by looking at the physical operation of the system. Oh sure, if you spent enough years with the tools of electrical diagnostics, you could eventually work out some of the basic rules of the operating system. But you simply can never distill the signal from the noise of what your actual program’s behavior is. That would take centuries.

Consciousness is facilitated by physical processes. It is not itself physical any more than a Minecraft world is physical.