Consciousness is, perhaps inevitably and as a function of psychological egoism, asserted as the ascendant peak of ordered information-processing significance but it is just as likely that our visceral experience of this complex, patterned experience and distributed computational system of matter and energy is only one, diminutive hyper-plane slice across a vast and plausibly unmeasurable possibility space of pattern, structure and – perhaps – knowledge. If consciousness as we know it, nebulous and amorphous, intimate yet mysterious and unknown, embodies anything of importance beyond behavioural solutions for each and all of our own existential requirements for embodied continuity, it is that there is a subtle information bootstrap and recursive, globally-distributed property here. There is something about “naturally”-occurring (i.e. not synthetic) information and energy processing systems that either transcends our computational analogues by very many orders of magnitude and sophistication OR there is a different kind of global logic in complex systems. I think the latter possibility is more likely.
Daedelus Kite 