There is an interesting scientific deduction that everything could literally be made of consciousness. It begins first with the easy question to think about: "Is everything made solely of information or is there some mysterious absolute energy or 'stuff' of space and energy." Many scientists, such as Max Tegmark, professor of physics at MIT, believe that everything is literally made of information. Remember the movie, The Matrix? That is a helpful analogy, where you can think about how in that reality, people invented machines, wrote poems, went to college, had kids, chose a life as a homeless person, etc. But all of those information events of life and space and energy happened in a one dimensional system of zeros and ones (binary computer code). There was never any actual space of, say, two feet between a man and the fireplace where he warmed his hands. There was never any actual energy of the fire. It was all pure abstract information. But it formed a perfectly reliable and realistic reality. Many scientists have come to this conclusion that that everything is abstract information by logical deduction. Now, if you reach that deduction, you can then acknowledge that one of the highest order or more complex systems of abstract information is human consciousness (it's the highest that we know of so far). Next, you can apply the principal of evolution, which does not merely occur in biological systems, it occurs throughout the universe in all information systems. So taking consciousness as one of those information systems, what is the upward limit of how it can evolve? Can group consciousness emerge, the way all the computers of the world created a collective mind in the movie The Matrix? There actually would be no upward evolutionary limit.
The Hameroff Penrose theory of consciousness emerging via a "quantum computing" process in the brain is very well known and nicely controversial with brilliant minds on both sides. Here is a video that explains it. This model speculates that consciousness can exist outside of the human brain, which of course begins to sound "spiritual". There is an interesting crossroads, where the issues of spirituality and philosophy converge with the answers being sought by theoretical physicists seeking an understanding of what the fabric of reality is like at the smallest scales.
