[alokm]

I also concur that "consciousness is an emergent physical property of massively interconnected systems". But "all matter has some degree of internal conscious experience" is really a philosophical question. Internet can be considered as a living being with different people acting as different components and communicating with each other the way neurons do. But is the internet as a whole, not its participants, conscious as a whole? That is a tough question.

I will try and read up the book you suggested. And I will point towards a very interesting theory I happened to have worked on (as a software developer) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Information_Theory which tries to quantify consciousnesses based on this interconnectedness.

[brotchie]

I just looked back through parts of Koch's book. He was indeed talking about IIT. The wiki article on IIT is interesting, I didn't realise IIT had such a rigorous mathematical definition! I'll read further.