To be conscious requires memory and enough intelligence to make informed decisions based on the past, and predictions of the future. Basically that’s the nuts and bolts, but some people might want to involve spiritual angles as well.

The Internet is a major part, now, of everyone’s memory. It is not conscious itself, it is a not a “being” – it is simply a repository. Even so, it is entwined with our collective human consciousness.

According to Rupert Sheldrake somewhere in the aether is morphic resonance, where species store shared experiences and are informed by them. A memory of a species. That repository, just like the Internet, is not conscious, but it is entwined.

In subtle ways human consciousness has changed and adjusted because of the memory the Internet provides us, just like if each of us somehow got better at remembering things personally. It is the same machine, but different inputs means different outputs.

Like books before it.

Wikipedia might be the closest to a man-designed morphic resonance, because we (some of us anyway) contribute to it, and many of us feed from it.

Morphic resonance is an unconscious Wikipedia, that we feed into and pull from without knowing it. But it binds us together as a species. And because each species uses the same system, it is like each species has their own page on Facebook – alone and together.

Gaia itself is not conscious. But we are more than just individual consciousnesses – we have shared information that we give and take from, share memories, shared decisions – we are all one, all living things, deep down. We just need to start recognising it.