[carapace]

If you work with any kind of evolutionary system or neural networks or meta-optimizers (Like Schmidhuber's Gödel machine) there comes a point when you realize that "intelligence", whatever it is, should be expected to arise. Evolution and meta-evolution proceed at the same time in life, so intelligence should be ambient in Nature. (This is what Wolfram has been talking about with his "New Kind of Science" tome, etc. Gregory Bateson also talked about this in "Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology" and "Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences)".)

Now, combine this idea, that meta-evolutionary adaptation naturally leads to ambient intelligence (put another way, living systems have as much intelligence as is adaptive, the limiting factor on the intelligence of the global ecosystem is NOT the difficulty of being intelligent because it's actually really easy to be intelligent) with the recent discovery that the oceans are a sort of naturally occuring Grey Goo[1], and it seems that the oceans themselves are intelligent.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo

> Marine phages, although microscopic and essentially unnoticed by scientists until recently, appear to be the most abundant and diverse form of DNA replicating agent on the planet. There are approximately 4x1030 phage in oceans or 5x107 per millilitre.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_bacteriophage . Ephasis added.