I have considered myself an atheist since high school but I feel like I have been forming my own beliefs about how the universe works and I’m curious about if there are others who think like me.
I have started thinking about free will a lot and how I don’t believe we actually have it (depending on what you want to define free will as.) This has caused me to think about how in reality we are not much different than a rock. We have just as much agency in our decisions as a rock does when it is pushed down a river. I’ve thought about our perspectives and why we see life like we do. What if we are just appendages of some greater energy based being kind of like cells are a part of us. We have cells in our body that are a part of us and perform tasks, but we cannot really manipulate them freely. What if life is like that but the other way around. Energy cannot be created or destroyed and it powers everything. The neurons in your brain are powered by energy it gets from glucose. I feel like everything sort of works like a puppet to this greater energy and when we die maybe we just realize we are a part of it. It feels like I have almost stumbled on my own relgion, but I am willing to accept that it probably isnt really like this and I am not intellegent enough to truly understand how everything works. Its just what I like to believe
You might be interested in Integrated information theory, which proposes that everything - from an electron up to a galaxy or bigger - can be said to have some unit of consciousness (for certain definitions of consciousness). It’s something between a mathematical framework and a philosophical one, but does put forth some hypotheses that touch on cosmology and thermodynamics and isn’t just nut job pseudoscience.