At the Daily Mail, science writer William Hunter reports,
Consciousness does not emerge from human brains, according to Professor Maria Strømme, a professor of nanotechnology at Uppsala University.
Instead, she claims that it exists as a fundamental field — a ‘building block’ of the universe.
If this is correct, ‘mysterious’ phenomena such as telepathy, near–death experiences, and even life after death could finally be explained by science.
According to Professor Strømme’s theory, consciousness does not end when we die.
Instead, when a person passes away, their consciousness simply returns to the background field.
“Physicist proposes radical new theory of consciousness — and it could finally explain what happens when you die,” November 26, 2025
Like a Wave Sinking into the Ocean
According to her model, consciousness underlies the universe. The separation of individual consciousnesses is an illusion. When we die, our consciousness simply returns to the universal field, as a wave sinks into the ocean.
Her model, unlike many modern materialist ones, accommodates terminal lucidity and near-death experiences:
‘If individual awareness is not generated only by the brain, but is an expression of a deeper field, as my model suggests, then moments when the brain is impaired could allow atypical access to that underlying field,’ says Professor Strømme.
Maria Strømme’s approach, like panpsychism, is perhaps best understood as part of a gradual recognition that the sort of materialism espoused by, say, Carl Sagan (1934–1996) or Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) is coming under fire for evidence-based reasons.
Plato’s Universe
Endless debunking, for example, is not going to provide a better means of understanding those near-death experiences whose details can be confirmed. And quantum mechanics is making clear, even to physicists whom we might not have expected to understand it, that we live in a universe closer to the vision of Plato (c. 427 – 348 BC) than of Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895).
Everything else is still up for grabs.
Editor’s note: For more on the universe according to Plato, see the recent book about the thinking of biologist Richard Sternberg, Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome, by David Klinghoffer (Discovery Institute Press).
Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.