This is really interesting, really interested in learning more about this. Is this an opinion specific to your own understanding or a belief held by a broader group of academics?
Yes, this is a belief held by a broader group of people, but I haven't booked up on it much myself. Some quick googles for "Quantum consciousness" and "consciousness as a fundamental field" brought up some of the arguments I remembered hearing about:
As I understand it, a common form of this framework is basically panpsychism, but more science-y and less metaphysics-y. Some people believe that consciousness may arise from a fundamental field in the universe just like how there's an electromagnetic field or a Higgs field. I vaguely remember hearing one theory that posits intelligent life forms are to the field of consciousness what photons/electrons are to the electromagnetic field — that is to say, spikes or clusters of energy in the field that stand out drastically against the background noise.
