Peter Briaros

A theory of everything ought to have something to say about an ordinary Tuesday. Whether to stay late for another small professional victory. Whether to call a friend. Whether to attempt something difficult when nobody can promise it will work.

I have been trying to construct a personal Theory of Everything, although the name is more ambitious than the project deserves. I am not trying to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics. I am trying to make sense of consciousness, identity, death, and the possibility that the boundaries between us are less fundamental than they feel.

In the end, I found a question that seemed more useful than another round of metaphysical argument:

If I took my own theory of everything seriously, how would I live differently?

The answer touched me deeply. An unusual picture of reality led to some very clear priorities. And those priorities seemed worth keeping even if the theory I developed can never be verified.

The starting point is simple: there is something rather than nothing. Now add a hypothesis: beneath all its apparent divisions, reality is one fundamental whole.

Philosophers call versions of this idea monism. The word covers several positions, so it helps to be precise: I am imagining a reality in which individual things exist, but are not ultimately independent of the whole they belong to.[\[1\]](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/monism/)

A wave has a shape, a history, and effects on everything around it. You can point to it and watch it break. Its dependence on the ocean does not make it imaginary.

Perhaps a person is something like that: real, distinct, temporary, and inseparable from a larger reality.

I wonder whether consciousness belongs to that underlying reality, with each of us experiencing it from a particular, bounded point of view. Philosophical accounts of cosmopsychism explore related possibilities.[\[2\]](https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onab019)

Under this hypothesis, the brain and body would help constitute the boundaries of a perspective: these memories, this body, this place, this moment. They would account for why experience feels like being me, with everything that includes and everything it excludes.

Other people would be equally real perspectives, with lives as vivid from the inside as my own. At the deepest level, what experiences the world through them might share its basis with what experiences the world through me.

Once I start thinking of identity as a boundary within reality, I find myself wondering about other boundaries: between self and world, life and death, perhaps even past and future. Could some be features of how experience is organized rather than permanent divisions in the underlying world?

But is there any form of testing this hypothesis?

This is where near-death experiences, reports of apparent past-life memories, mediumship claims, precognitive experiences, and striking coincidences enter the picture. Those anomalies eventually point toward something these boundaries fail to capture.

Near-death research has documented vivid recollections from survivors of cardiac arrest and resuscitation.[\[3\]](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resuscitation.2023.109903)[\[14\]](https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736%2801%2907100-8)[\[15\]](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resuscitation.2014.09.004) Some case reports describe perceptions of medical events that investigators later corroborated, despite the patients appearing deeply unconscious.[\[16\]](https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc799351/m2/1/high%5Fres%5Fd/vol25-no2-69.pdf)[\[17\]](https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2015/11/Do-Near-Death-Experiences-Provide-Evidence-for-Survival-of-Human-Personality.pdf) In the much-discussed Pam Reynolds case, surgery included a period of recorded electrical brain silence; whether her corroborated perceptions occurred during that specific interval remains unresolved.[\[18\]](https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc799458/m2/1/high%5Fres%5Fd/vol25-no4-257.pdf)

Some researchers interpret these cases as evidence that consciousness may not depend entirely on ordinary brain function. A 2026 multicentre experiment also reported differences between groups in later recognition of sounds played during resuscitation.[\[19\]](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xinn.2026.101355) These findings leave an intriguing question open, is consciousness living outside the brain?

But of all such studies, I continue to find the young-child cases the hardest anomaly to dismiss. More than 2,500 cases have now been systematically investigated in which young children spontaneously report apparent memories of another person’s life. In the stronger cases, investigators have identified a particular deceased individual whose life corresponds strikingly with the child’s statements.[\[6\]](https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/our-research/children-who-report-memories-of-previous-lives/)

Some children produce remarkably specific information. Some display unusual behaviors corresponding to the deceased person. There are reported associations between violent injuries of the deceased and congenital abnormalities in the child; one published analysis examined 36 very-short-intermission cases and found corresponding birthmarks or birth defects in 32, although this remains observational evidence and desperately needs independent replication.[\[7\]](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2022.08.019)

Last but not least, scepticism about mediumship is extremely high among humans with a materialistic worldview. And indeed, there’s an enormous amount of obvious cold reading, vague statements, confirmation bias and outright entertainment masquerading as communication with the dead. But that’s not the interesting material.

The interesting experiments deliberately remove those mechanisms: In one triple-blind experiment, mediums did not meet the sitters and were themselves blinded to their identities. Sitters later evaluated readings against controls. Target readings were rated significantly higher than controls.[\[8\]](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2006.10.004) Another blinded replication involving 86 readings reported significant target/control differences across several measures.[\[9\]](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2015.01.001) A later triple-blind experiment found that 65.8% of intended readings were correctly identified against a 50% chance expectation and that intended readings contained more information rated correct than controls.[\[10\]](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2021.05.009) And a meta-analysis collected 18 modern experiments rather than relying upon one spectacular study.[\[11\]](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2020.04.002)

And now we reach UFO encounters: There is no good scientific basis currently for saying that UAP are extraterrestrial craft, let alone that aliens understand consciousness.[\[12\]](https://science.nasa.gov/uap/faqs/) But the encounter literature contains something curious. The deeper one gets into reported close encounters, the less they resemble conventional encounters with spacecraft. People report altered states, missing time, apparently telepathic communication, bizarre perceptual effects and dreamlike experiences. An older psychological study of UFO experiencers is interesting precisely because people reporting intense encounters weren’t simply found to be globally psychotic, unintelligent or unusually hypnotizable compared with controls.[\[13\]](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8282933/)

If this picture is true, somewhere in the enormous literature there should be cross-over cases that shouldn’t exist under the competing explanations: a child remembering information acquired by the previous personality during an NDE; an NDE revealing a death unknown to everyone present and independently timestamped; a medium describing information from an alleged previous life unknown to both sitter and medium; independently investigated reincarnation cases containing memories specifically of the interval between death and birth.

What does it tell us? Consciousness may be fundamental or at least nonlocal in a way we don’t yet understand. A living brain creates a strongly bounded individual perspective within it. Death destroys that biological localization and much of the personality structure built upon it, but consciousness—and perhaps some organized information belonging to that life—does not necessarily disappear.

Still, a model that can accommodate almost any unusual story is easy to like and hard to test.

However, if we are onto something here and if other conscious beings are perspectives within the same underlying reality or even consciousness, their experiences become harder to treat as distant or secondary. Their joy and suffering belong as fully to the world as mine do.

That thought changes the weight I give to relationships. A job title tells me where I sit in an organization. A friendship changes the texture of two lives. Helping someone through a difficult year, raising a child, teaching somebody something that opens up their world: these seem close to what makes being conscious valuable in the first place.

There is also evidence for the everyday value of connection that asks us to believe nothing unusual about the universe.[\[4\]](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20545426/) The practical consequence is straightforward: give relationships time, especially when there is no deadline forcing me to do so. Make the call. Pay attention to the answer. Be available when being available is inconvenient.

Invest more in people than in the scoreboard attached to yourself.

The model leaves an enormous question unanswered: why would an underlying consciousness have limited perspectives at all?

I do not know. I cannot even assume that there is a purpose behind it. But the question makes me notice something about limitation: it gives experience much of its character.

There is a difference between describing courage and acting while afraid. Between knowing the facts about love and becoming vulnerable to another person. Between understanding a problem in principle and struggling until something finally clicks.

Uncertainty makes discovery possible. Our limits give us something to encounter, something to learn, and something to lose. Notch, the builder of Minecraft, once said: “Life is boring when you’re not in survival mode.” This is a reference to playing Minecraft without any zombies that might kill you at any moment when you enter a dark cave.

Are we living in an experience creation machine that we created for ourselves? Experiences that revise my understanding or change what I am capable of? The phrase sounds technical; the activity need not be. Learning an instrument, building something that may fail, listening seriously to someone whose assumptions unsettle mine, or committing to care for another person can all qualify.

But constant novelty would become its own treadmill. You see, some of the richest experiences emerge through repetition: returning to the same work, staying in a relationship through a hard period, noticing more in a place I thought I knew. Often, the hardest experiences are the diamonds that we take out from this life.

Comfort and security make much of this life predictable. But I would be disappointed to discover that I had spent my whole life preparing to live, removing one more uncertainty before allowing anything significant to happen.

Leave room for experiences whose outcome you cannot fully control.

I have a name, a history, ambitions, responsibilities, successes, and failures. Together they form the person I recognize as myself.

If the model is even approximately right, that person is a particular expression of something larger. I can take the role seriously without expecting it to contain everything I am.

This is the practical consequence I find most useful. It lets ambition keep its place without taking every other place too. I can work hard, build things, earn money, and care about doing well. A setback can hurt without becoming a verdict on my entire existence.

The scoreboard is still inside the game.

It helps to spend time doing things that offer no useful score: walking without tracking the distance, making something nobody will evaluate, helping someone without claiming credit, being with family without mentally turning the afternoon into a productivity problem.

These moments interrupt the habit of treating every experience as evidence that I am succeeding or failing.

Take the character seriously. Hold it lightly.

Imagine that neuroscience eventually explains consciousness so convincingly that this whole picture becomes unnecessary. Every apparent anomaly receives an ordinary explanation. There is no shared consciousness beneath our separate lives. When a brain stops functioning permanently, that person’s experience ends.

What would I regret having done because I entertained the alternative?

I would have given more time to the people I love. I would have learned difficult things and allowed some experiences to change me. I would have cared about my work without asking my career or reputation to carry the entire meaning of my life.

Those choices still seem defensible. If our time is finite in the most absolute sense, they may feel more urgent.

That is what I mean by a philosophy that is robust under model failure. Its practical value survives the collapse of its grandest claims.

This is no permission to believe whatever feels good. I still owe the idea criticism, evidence, and a willingness to let it go. But I do not have to settle the architecture of consciousness before deciding how to spend the afternoon.

My Theory of Everything may turn out to be wrong. If I reach the end of my life and have truly followed my own advice (still under test)—and, for the sake of the argument, have loved people well, stayed curious, and held my own importance a little more lightly—I suspect that being wrong about the universe will be fairly low on my list of regrets.

1. Jonathan Schaffer, “Monism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The distinction between priority monism (one fundamental whole, with dependent parts) and existence monism (only one concrete object exists) is particularly useful here. Neither, by itself, establishes a universal consciousness.

2. Jonardon Ganeri and Itay Shani, “What Is Cosmopsychism?” The Monist 105(1), 1–5 (2022). This provides philosophical context for the idea that individual minds depend on consciousness at the level of the cosmos; it is not empirical evidence for the proposal.

3. Sam Parnia and colleagues, “AWAreness during REsuscitation – II: A multi-center study of consciousness and awareness in cardiac arrest,” Resuscitation 191, 109903 (2023). Of 567 in-hospital cardiac arrests, 53 people survived and 28 completed interviews; 11 reported memories or perceptions suggestive of consciousness. Nobody identified the visual target; one participant identified the auditory stimulus. The small interviewed sample and the setting of active resuscitation matter when interpreting the findings. EEG activity consistent with consciousness re-emerged during CPR; the study did not establish perception in the complete absence of brain activity.

4. Robert J. Waldinger and Marc S. Schulz, “What’s love got to do with it? Social functioning, perceived health, and daily happiness in married octogenarians,” Psychology and Aging 25(2), 422–431 (2010). This eight-day study of 47 older couples found daily associations between time with others and happiness. It does not establish causation or show that the same pattern holds for everyone.

5. Anil K. Seth and Tim Bayne, “Theories of consciousness,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 23, 439–452 (2022). This review compares four prominent approaches and discusses how to distinguish them empirically. It offers a useful scientific counterweight to the speculation in this essay.

6. University of Virginia, Division of Perceptual Studies, Children Who Report Memories of Past Lives. The research group reports a collection of more than 2,500 cases, with most coded on more than 200 variables. This is a case collection, not a count of conclusively verified reincarnations.

7. James G. Matlock, “Congenital physical anomalies associated with deceased persons in reincarnation cases with intermissions of less than nine months,” Explore 19(2), 170–175 (2023). The review identified 36 cases with intervals under nine months, 32 of which had reported corresponding physical anomalies. These were selected published cases, not a controlled prospective sample.

8. Julie Beischel and Gary E. Schwartz, “Anomalous Information Reception by Research Mediums Demonstrated Using a Novel Triple-Blind Protocol,” Explore 3(1), 23–27 (2007). Eight mediums participated. “Sitters” are the living people seeking a reading about a deceased person; in this experiment they scored the readings without knowing which was intended for them.

9. Julie Beischel, Mark Boccuzzi, Michael Biuso, and Adam J. Rock, “Anomalous Information Reception by Research Mediums Under Blinded Conditions II: Replication and Extension,” Explore 11(2), 136–142 (2015). Twenty research mediums participated in 86 readings; the sample sizes for individual scoring analyses differed.

10. Patrizio Tressoldi and colleagues, “Mediumship accuracy: A quantitative and qualitative study with a triple-blind protocol,” Explore 18(4), 411–415 (2022; first published online in 2021). Nine mediums produced 38 readings. The reported correct-identification rate was 65.8%, compared with a 50% chance benchmark.

11. Matthew Sarraf, Michael A. Woodley of Menie, and Patrizio Tressoldi, “Anomalous information reception by mediums: A meta-analysis of the scientific evidence,” Explore 17(5), 396–402 (2021). The analysis included 18 experiments from 14 papers published between 2001 and December 2019.

12. NASA, UAP FAQs. NASA states that there is no evidence that UAP are extraterrestrial.

13. Nicholas P. Spanos, Patricia A. Cross, Kirby Dickson, and Susan C. DuBreuil, “Close encounters: An examination of UFO experiences,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 102(4), 624–632 (1993). The study found no greater psychopathology, lower intelligence, or greater hypnotizability in the experiencer groups than in comparison groups. Intense experiences were more often sleep-related; the findings do not establish an extraterrestrial cause.

14. Pim van Lommel, Ruud van Wees, Vincent Meyers, and Ingrid Elfferich, “Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands,” The Lancet 358(9298), 2039–2045 (2001). In this prospective study across ten hospitals, 62 of 344 resuscitated patients reported a near-death experience. The authors questioned whether existing physiological explanations were sufficient. The findings document reported experiences associated with cardiac arrest; they do not establish that those experiences occurred during a simultaneously measured absence of all brain activity.

15. Sam Parnia and colleagues, “AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A prospective study,” Resuscitation 85(12), 1799–1805 (2014). Among 2,060 cardiac-arrest events, 140 survivors completed initial interviews and 101 completed the second stage. One patient’s recollection of resuscitation events was corroborated, from a period when the authors expected cerebral function to be absent. Brain inactivity was inferred rather than established by EEG in that patient; this was not a successful identification of a concealed visual target.

16. Penny Sartori, Paul Badham, and Peter Fenwick, “A Prospectively Studied Near-Death Experience with Corroborated Out-of-Body Perceptions and Unexplained Healing,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 25(2), 69–84 (2006). This case, documented during a prospective hospital study, includes descriptions of staff actions corroborated by witnesses and medical notes. The patient was deeply unconscious but did not identify the hidden visual target. No EEG recording established absent brain activity.

17. Emily Williams Cook, Bruce Greyson, and Ian Stevenson, “Do Any Near-Death Experiences Provide Evidence for the Survival of Human Personality after Death? Relevant Features and Illustrative Case Reports,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 12(3), 377–406 (1998). The authors examine fourteen cases combining clear cognition, out-of-body experiences, and apparently anomalous perceptions. In Al Sullivan’s case, physicians corroborated his description of a surgeon’s unusual elbow movements. The authors regard the combined evidence as suggestive, while acknowledging weaknesses in recording and investigation; the series does not demonstrate perception during measured brain inactivity.

18. Michael B. Sabom, “Commentary on ‘Does Paranormal Perception Occur in Near-Death Experiences?’” Journal of Near-Death Studies 25(4), 257–260 (2007). Sabom discusses the Pam Reynolds case originally reported in his book Light & Death (1998). Her operation included documented flat cortical and brainstem evoked responses and circulatory standstill. He interprets her reported experience as continuous across that period, but explicitly states that this continuity rests on her testimony, correlated at some points with operating-room events. The corroborated perceptions were not independently timed to the interval of electrical silence.

19. Álex Escolà-Gascón and colleagues, “Quantum evidence of nonlocal consciousness during clinical death,” The Innovation (2026), 101355. This randomized, double-blind study across thirteen hospitals analysed 142 survivors who reported lucid experiences around cardiac arrest. It found differences between experimental groups in recognition of sounds played during resuscitation. The authors interpret the results as evidence of nonlocal consciousness, but systematic EEG monitoring was unavailable; the study therefore does not establish perception in the absence of brain activity.