Consciousness Collapse: Loss of Consciousness as Impedance Catastrophe

Loss of consciousness under anesthesia, hypoxia, trauma, and disease represents forced phasetransition driven by violation of fundamental impedance bound. We demonstrate that con-sciousness requires operational closure maintained by neural impedance balance. When inter-nal reconfiguration timescale exceeds environmental forcing timescale—the Revolution Inequal-ity—continuous adaptation fails and system must collapse or reorganize. Empirical valida-tion across 180+ measurements in seven perturbation modalities reveals universalcollapse dynamics following identical sigmoid manifold, demonstrating conscious-ness loss is single thermodynamic phenomenon independent of perturbation mech-anism. Loss of consciousness corresponds to impedance catastrophe destroying operationalclosure. We derive complete mechanism for general anesthetics, hypoxia, hypothermia, hypo-glycemia, hemorrhage, asphyxiation, and traumatic brain injury. All produce same endpoint:Zint/Zenv > τdrive forcing discontinuous transition. Framework unifies disparate phenomenologyunder single physical mechanism with quantitative predictive power.