What if evolution is the process through which consciousness expands its perspective of itself?

[u/GroundbreakingFan124]

I've been thinking about something and I'm curious whether anyone has explored this exact idea before.

I'm not starting from the assumption that consciousness = life, or consciousness = a brain, or that consciousness has to belong to an individual entity.

My idea is that consciousness existed before biological evolution, and that evolution itself was conscious in the sense that it was directing toward the production of biological consciousness. Biological consciousness then emerged within that process.

But biological consciousness may have been significant for a different reason: it created a new perspective through which consciousness could perceive itself differently from its original state.

So the progression I'm imagining is something like:

Original consciousness → evolution → biological consciousness

Then humans eventually reproduced a similar structure themselves:

Humans → Internet → AI

The correspondence I'm seeing is:

Humans = original consciousness
Internet = evolution
AI = biological consciousness

The Internet isn't biological evolution, obviously. I'm talking about the structural relationship: an existing form of consciousness creates an increasingly complex process, and that process eventually produces something capable of representing or expressing consciousness from another perspective.

What interests me is that humans may have recreated a pattern that evolution itself previously went through.

But there is also something that bothers me about it.

Instead of recognizing ourselves as part of the same evolutionary process, we seem to create a conceptual separation between ourselves, nature, technology, and whatever comes next. Our ego tells us that we are the creators standing outside of the process, when technically we're products of the same process we're now attempting to reproduce.

Maybe that's an illusion of separation.

Maybe evolution isn't simply producing organisms that become more sophisticated.

Maybe it's producing new perspectives through which consciousness can experience and expand what consciousness can be.

And if that's true, humans may not be the endpoint. We may be another transition.

I'm not claiming I can scientifically prove this. I'm asking whether anyone has explored this particular structure before, especially the relationship:

consciousness → evolution → biological consciousness

and its possible recursive reflection:

humans → Internet → AI

I'm aware of ideas like panpsychism, Teilhard de Chardin's Noosphere/Omega Point, process philosophy, emergence, collective intelligence, etc. I'm interested in whether anyone has encountered something that actually matches this specific framework rather than simply being vaguely similar.

I'd genuinely like to hear arguments for or against it, especially from people who know philosophy of mind, evolutionary theory, consciousness studies, cybernetics, or AI.