What then is consciousness? What is the “I,” the thing that is doing the observing when I think about my thoughts? Some people posit a soul. Ebon Muse proposes a construct along the lines of distributed intelligence. Scientists call it the “hard problem” of the study of consciousness.
If the consciousness, the watcher that is observing the mental processes and the metaphorical movie screen in your head, is a matter of distributed intelligence, then we can think as a unified consciousness the same way that swarms of bugs can act as a whole unit even though the decision-making isn’t happening at any one point in the swarm. Your brain is thus the hyper-complex neurological analogy to a swarm. Every mind is a hive mind.
If such a thing is possible on the small scale, then I find it entirely possible to imagine that it happens on the large scale, or even on the largest possible scale. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to think that the universe, the cosmos, has a kind of consciousness that is composed of distributed intelligence. It wouldn’t be a consciousness like ours- it would be so big and in such a different context that not only would it be so alien we could never interface with it, but the sheer difference in scale and the nature of consciousness means that it would be categorically impossible to wrap our minds around what it is.
Yes, we are part of it. Everything is part of it. If it exists, that is.
But if it isn’t conscious or intelligent in any way at all, it still exists. The cosmos unquestionably is. And to me it is equally unquestionable that separateness is not, in fact. Thus, the cosmos not only is, but it is us. We’re part of it when we rest in dreamless sleep, when your brain is not tricking you into believing that you’re separate from other things. We’re also part of it when we’re dead. Actually, we’re always part of it, but there are times when nothing is trying to trick us into believing that we aren’t, and that there’s a difference between me and you. But at those odd times, like when we meditate and lose track of our individual identities, our Self merges into the Whole.
What could be more fantastic?
Sailing to Byzantium 
Sounds a bit like Charles Hartshorne ( http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hartshorne/ ; http://www.hyattcarter.com/hartshorne.htm ), who’s a good example of a panentheist (God both is and trancends the universe). There’s also Spinoza, of course.
And, yep, it’s *wonderful*.
I don’t know that I buy off on panentheism. And I’m not saying that I believe that the unievrse is sentient, but that I think it not at all unreasonable to postulate that it could be.
I am entirely unfamiliar with Spinoza.
“I don’t know that I buy off on panentheism. And I’m not saying that I believe that the unievrse is sentient, but that I think it not at all unreasonable to postulate that it could be.”
Fair enough. Given that I’m only a panentheist on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I quite understand.:)
As for Spinoza, he’s pretty much the Platonic form of a philosophical pantheist:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/
I’ve never been entirely sure what to make of his system, but there is an icy, awesome, almost transcendant beauty to it and it’s implications. I can see why Einstein was a fan. (It’s also a bit wacky in places, but most speculative metaphysics have that problem.)
The ghost in the machine hypothesis has pretty much lost support outside of religion. The borderlands of abstract psychology still have some adherents, and even some non-theist philosophers, but they’re few and far between outside of religion or religion based metaphysics. The hard problem, as you rightly put it, is trying to figure out the mechanisms of consciouness and how it comes about. The hard problem, really, is the mind-body problem. One rather popular strain of argument suggests that what we call “mind” (or “I” if you like) is actually a fiction of physiological processes. But the theories are profligate, though few suggest the hidden manipulator in light of modern neuroscience.
This sounds rather like Jung’s collective unconscious, in which there are a limited number of archetypal images that populate dreams regardless of the dreamer’s individual conditioning.
Something like that, maybe.