Today, many scientists and philosophers understand consciousness as an emergent property of organized fractal systems. In the case of our consciousness, nerve cells interact by means of simple “if, then” operations by releasing and reacting to neurotransmitters. These interactions between neurons are autonomous, and take place in the context of a complete lack of awareness of the greater network. However, information is processed and stored according to specific arrangements of neurological connections. This process perfectly fits the definition of a computer (a system which stores and manipulates data according to instructions.)This storage of information through autonomous interaction is not unique to neurons in the brain. Because all of reality is simply information and thus can be represented numerically, all systematic interactions are computers. All interactions code, store and manipulate data. All systems, including the weather, circulatory systems, the internet, a small roadside diner in Kansas, even the metabolic reactions in a bacterium living in a hot water vent on the bottom of the ocean, are computers, running calculations of varying degrees of complexity. The amalgamation of data stored and processed on the neurological network of our brain is called human consciousness. Using the previously mentioned understanding of consciousness (as emergent of the data stored in the interactions of organized fractal networks,) we can say that any system, alive or not, exhibits behaviors which express at least degrees of consciousness and that consciousness is simply a definable point of complexity in that system’s interactions and calculations.
Much like nerve cells in the brain, humans (and other organisms) interact with each other autonomously as units in higher, more complex networks such as families, cities, nations, and populations. These networks are fractal in that each part is analogous to the whole, as evidenced by the striking resemblances of the behavior of the microcosm to that of the macrocosm. Cities (systems of humans) viewed from space resemble bacterial colonies (systems of prokaryotes), roads circulate humans (base units of populations) through populations just as veins circulate cells (base units of humans) through the body. The self-regulatory behaviors of the economy so resemble those of more “traditional organisms” that many chaos theorists, biologists, and economists describe the economy and other systems in biological terms as types of “social organisms.” When these very different units and composite systems are viewed from analogous perspectives, they are identical, meaning that they are analogous representations of the same relationships and are therefore fractal. This fractal relationship implies that, just like the cell, higher organisms such as humans are also units of greater organizational systems or “organisms” called super-consciousnesses. These greater fractal levels of organization exhibit their own emergent behaviors and properties, of which we—much like the nerve cell—are unaware.
These computing networks permeate the universe. Whether it is prokaryotes interacting to form cells (as described in endosymbiotic theory), cells interacting to form organisms, organisms interacting to form populations, populations and natural systems interacting to form a greater planetary organism (as described by the Gaia hypothesis), planets interacting to form solar systems, solar systems interacting to form galaxies, galaxies interacting to form the universe, or universes interacting to form the multiverse (as described by quantum mechanical models of reality), these networks encompass, organize, and unify all matter in the universe into a higher network composed of many networks.