Just think, just a few thousand years ago, a blink in geologic time, vast parts of Europe and North America were under a mile of solid ice. Today, the glacier is gone and these barren, scraped lands are covered with a dense network of biological communities, habitats and ecosystems that have evolved into every niche in those environments. Biogeographical change occurs much faster than biological evolution, and certainly faster than geological activity.
It would not be unreasonable to suspect some form of consciousness was assisting here; not the consciousness of a god or spirit, but something inherent in and emerging from organic life itself.

There are many species of coral in one reef, and the symbiotic algae that photosynthesize nutrients in their tissues. Then there are all the fish, worms, molluscs, microbes, crustaceans and thousands of other creatures and plants that are living in the reef and contribute to its total metabolism, both as predator, prey or commensal and symbiotic relationships. It is a community of many organisms, each being a cell in the larger body, and each group of similar “cells” acting as a different tissue in a huge collective. At higher levels, the individual tissues work together as organs and organ systems. These all interact together in a variety of ways…the clown fish keeps the anemone clean and free of parasites and it receives protection and shelter from its host. Neither could flourish without the other.

The reef consists of many species which depend on each other and do not exist in isolation, just as our blood, muscle, nerve, connective, bone and nerve cells and tissues interact to form an independent life form with a sense of its own existence and consciousness, but which, until recently, was completely unaware of the individual parts that made up the whole. We are all a multitude.

The reef, like any ecosystem, is an interactive system bound together through an infinite collection of relationships. You can say the same for any ecosystem, but the coral reef and the tropical rain forest are the most complex ones on earth. They may even be complex enough to evolve consciousness.

But if they have indeed evolved a consciousness, it is one that operates at time scales far slower than ours, and the devastation we inflict on those systems through our activities (like fishing with dynamite or logging, mining and slash-and-burn agriculture) is probably “perceived” the way we perceive the chemical imbalances we experience as infections or cancers.

We are a disease on this planet and if we don’t stop soon, we will either kill it or we will change it to some form that will no longer support us.

Coral, though, is much less populated and living in a 2D world. You can walk into a forest, but once you reach the coral, you’re not going any deeper without a lot of help (picks, dynamite, a saw…). A healthy lump of coral is animal and may look like a brain, but I’m pretty sure most of it (the interior) is lifeless calcium mineral deposit, like a clam shell. A healthy forest, on the other hand, is entirely living, but still an inoffensive plant and harder to read.

Silly concepts for sure, but the mystery of it all remains.

Novelist Stanislaw Lem has speculated on an entire planet being an intelligent entity in his novel Solaris. Or perhaps Sagan got it right the first time, the universe allows (or causes!) intelligent life forms to evolve as its “thinking” organs. This is the most likely scenario, since a self-aware consciousness may not appear spontaneously, but might much more easily evolve through Darwinian natural selection.

If it is indeed the case that there are super-intelligences like smart galaxies or smart stars or planets, our best strategy for detecting them would be to devise methods of communicating with them. Unfortunately, I can’t conceive of any such “communication” we could initiate that might not be interpreted by the consciousness as an attack, a natural catastrophe, or even not be perceivable at all.

To sum up, there may be all sorts of consciousness(es) operating in the cosmos, but we may simply be incapable of recognizing it, or if we did, we might mistake it for a god.

It is so bad that once when I came across an exceptionally well written piece, I went out of the way to post a lengthy positive review in the comments section of the story and then contacted the publication directly to commend them for hiring such a competent writer.

There is nothing wrong with doing that, of course- great discoveries start off that way- what is wrong is when you present that speculation as anything more than speculation.