A Neuroscientist’s Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious

WIRED: The internet is integrated. Could it be conscious?

Koch: It’s difficult to say right now. But consider this. The internet
contains about 10 billion computers, with each computer itself having a
couple of billion transistors in its CPU. So the internet has at least
10^19 transistors, compared to the roughly 1000 trillion (or quadrillion)
synapses in the human brain. That’s about 10,000 times more transistors
than synapses. But is the internet more complex than the human brain? It
depends on the degree of integration of the internet.

For instance, our brains are connected all the time. On the internet,
computers are packet-switching. They’re not connected permanently, but
rapidly switch from one to another. But according to my version of
panpsychism, it feels like something to be the internet — and if the
internet were down, it wouldn’t feel like anything anymore. And that is, in
principle, not different from the way I feel when I’m in a deep, dreamless
sleep.

http://www.wired.com/2013/11/christof-koch-panpsychism-consciousness/

I think I'm writing the first fully connected robot for the web of linked
data ( http://klaranet.com/ )

Leads to interesting questions on whether the internet is conscious,
whether google search is, whether robots are, and whether they should have
rights ...