Most of us are aware that not even Einstein could unite Quantum Mechanics with General Relativity. Something fundamental was missing.
For a couple hundred years smallism dominated the search to find ever more fundamental qualities of the universe. The rabbit hole of smallism is string theory and is stuck in the complexity of multiple dimensions of an unknown number.

Maxwell found that electromagnetism could not be explained by the fundamentals of mass, energy and space so he sought fundamental laws for just EM. He gave us the fundamental equations that only deal with electrodynamics. In a similar way we need to apply this fundamental search for only the missing/uniting qualities of the universe.

That search brings us to the crazy idea in which we are all immersed, like water is to fish. That fundamental quality is Consciousness. Some scientists cried 'This is impossible since science is objective and consciousness is subjective'. Of course, materialistic science is objective but look at the clues of quantum mechanics with all possible paths.

A theory of consciousness is emerging slowly today with the help of Penrose and others but the idea has been around for a very long time.
The theories so far apply to any place where information is transferred. New organelles of brain tissue are demonstrating the theory of panpsychism when two organelles fuse together on their own.