Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• In a controversial 2025 paper, a researcher proposed a theory that consciousness may give rise to matter—not the other way around.
• Should this theory hold up, it would rewrite our understanding of major events, such as the Big Bang.
• This isn’t the first time a scientist has suggested that the mind precedes the material world—but that doesn’t mean the theory goes without criticism.

In the beginning, it was consciousness. Not individual minds, but something omnipresent, awareness itself. The universe—space, time, matter, stars, galaxies, our own sun, and distant worlds like Neptune—came later. Or rather, according to a controversial new theory, it came from that underlying form of awareness. It’s a bold claim, pushing against how modern science understands reality and drawing criticism from experts in the field.

In a 2025 paper published in the peer-reviewed journal AIP Advances, Maria Strømme, PhD, a professor of materials science at Uppsala University, proposed that consciousness is a foundational field from which physical reality takes shape. She drew on ideas from quantum field theory, emergence, and symmetry breaking, but her model didn’t rely on physics alone. It also incorporated non-dual philosophy, the idea that the separation we see between mind, matter, and the world may not be real.

In Strømme’s model, the Big Bang—the leading theory of the universe’s origin—may not mark the moment the universe erupted into existence, but rather when a universal consciousness field differentiated into the world we observe. In other words, last November’s paper argues that what we call the Big Bang may actually be the moment a unified field of awareness gives rise to space, time, and matter, turning a formless state into the dense world we observe.

Strømme isn’t the first to make this case. Physicists have long explored the possibility that mind may precede the material world. Max Planck, one of the founders of quantum theory, believed that matter is derivative of consciousness. Erwin Schrödinger, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and pioneer of quantum mechanics, similarly suggested that sentience is “one and not many,” or unitary rather than fragmented across individuals. David Bohm, a theoretical physicist known for his work on quantum theory, proposed that reality may unfold from a hidden “implicate order” beneath what we observe. Strømme’s model is simply taking the next step, bringing these ideas into a more formal, physics-inspired framework.

The idea is attention-grabbing—but highly controversial. One of its skeptics, Michael Pravica, PhD, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, sees it as leaning anthropocentric. For him, reality forms through a web of interactions. He believes everything in the universe constantly interacts, and consciousness is just one part of that process.

“Reality depends upon the totality of these interactions—not just one person, not just all humanity, not just all matter,” Pravica says.

The world exists independently of awareness or observers and includes phenomena we cannot directly perceive. For Pravica, reality includes far more than what we can perceive. Even subatomic particles like neutrinos, which are nearly massless particles that pass through matter almost undetected, move through our bodies by the thousands every second without us noticing. “Though we may not be aware of this, these neutrinos still form part of reality… You must also account for aspects of reality that we cannot yet measure, including hyperdimensionality”—an idea he has explored in previous Popular Mechanics reporting, suggesting that the universe may extend beyond the three spatial dimensions we experience, outside the limits of present-day science.

But does any of this actually support the idea that consciousness comes first—or does it point in a different direction?

From a neuroscience perspective, there is little to support Strømme’s idea. Most models still start from a reductionist, materialist framework which suggests that physical processes in the brain give rise to awareness, not the other way around. In other words, most accepted models are the exact opposite of what Strømme proposed.

“I can’t think of any evidence—or studies—supporting the idea that consciousness is fundamental,” says Mona Sobhani, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist and author who writes about the intersection of neuroscience and spirituality. Questions like these, she adds, have traditionally belonged to philosophy, even if some researchers are now trying to bring them into the realm of science.

One of them is Donald Hoffman, PhD, a professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

Hoffman and his collaborators ran evolutionary simulations using computer models in which virtual organisms competed based on how they perceived their environment. They found that those tuned to objective reality consistently lost to those that saw only what was useful for survival. In his so-called interface theory of perception, he proposes that what we experience as space, time, and objects functions less like a window onto reality and more like a “desktop interface with icons”—useful representations, but not the underlying reality, as Sobhani puts it. It doesn’t go as far as Strømme’s theory, but it raises a similar possibility: that the physical world we perceive may not be the most fundamental layer of reality. In this view, spacetime and physical objects (including the brain) resemble icons on that computer. “Neural activity correlates with behavior because both are part of the interface that humans evolved to see, not because brains truly generate behavior,” Sobhani says.

This interface view, however, has also faced its share of backlash. Some researchers argue that Hoffman’s conclusions stretch far beyond what the simulations can support, turning a model about perception into a sweeping claim about reality itself, and, in some cases, even a self-defeating one. Yet even if the idea stops short of proof, it points to a more unsettling possibility: that the world we experience may not reflect its deepest structure—or, put simply, that what we see is not what we get. Taken together, Strømme’s and Hoffman’s ideas sound an alarm: that the world we perceive may not be the whole package. This tension reflects a broader trend in science where researchers are blending fields once seen as bitterly divorced.

“Questions like these [about the nature of consciousness and the true structure of reality] used to fall in the domain of philosophy, but work like Hoffman’s shows that it may be possible to bridge the fields,” says Sobhani. But does that bridge hold for everyone? Some see it less as a crossing point—and more as a line that shouldn’t be blurred. Pravica is one of them.

“Such questions are fundamentally metaphysical,” Pravica says, less a testable scientific claim and more a matter of interpretation. While he points to a deep connectedness underlying the universe (which, as an Orthodox Christian, he has described as God, a totality of consciousness), he also highlights a key limitation that keeps such ideas in the realm of speculation: “I don’t see any physical evidence beyond the connectedness of everything,” Pravica concludes, referring to the theory that everything in the universe may be non-separable at a basic level.

For now, Strømme’s idea that, before matter stirred, there was something mind-like is just one of more than 350 and growing competing theories trying to explain consciousness. Whether any of them reflect reality—or just our interface with it—remains very much up in the air. But the conversation is heating up.