My thinking goes along similar lines. Perhaps consciousness is somehow a product of complex systems. Perhaps the Solar System, with its millions of gravitationa

My thinking goes along similar lines. Perhaps consciousness is somehow a product of complex systems. Perhaps the Solar System, with its millions of gravitationally-coupled objects, is conscious? Perhaps the Sun, or Earth's mantle, are conscious too? The question to me would be not > what reason would there be for that to happen. but rather, what mechanism could possibly be responsible for it? What mechanism carries it? If consciousness is real, and my subjective experience of reality a true thing, then there is a distinction between consciousness being present and not present. These must somehow be differently encoded in matter, or require that matter is embedded in some kind of meta-matter that bestows consciousness on it. It's like EM waves requiring a "medium". First people thought it's waves through aether. Then we realised it's excitations of the magnetic and electric fields, so not strictly "material". But these are physical properties of the vacuum, i.e. "material" in that sense - real things. The medium is not material, but a property of vacuum. What is the medium of consciousness?