Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

I've very many times expressed my doubts about attempting to describe the universe or consciousness in terms of the fashion of the day. That computers exist all around us ought to cast serious doubts upon any theory which is so enamoured of this idiom, just as previous generations were caught up in the idiom of God as a watchmaker. At that time, clocks and watches had become the miracle technology of the day, solving many problems such as navigation at sea and being able to construct a railway timetable where everyone was using the same synchronised time - though that meant detaching oneself from the natural movement of the sun across the sky.

Though I have another angle on all of this. My grounding in the nature of consciousness is not of endless fussing around with transmission of data, busy activity. The one thing I come back to as the foundation is simply being. To be. That is my bedrock. It is how I understand reincarnation, not through transmission of information, meaningless facts such as names and dates, but on the continuation of that state of being, in the eternal now. In meditation, it is always the slowing, the bringing to a halt all restless thought, to just be. That is where I like to reside. (There may be a parallel here with the way clocks detached us from natural cycles of the sun, data transmission detaches us from being. Rediscovering what we are requires a letting go.)

Like you, my starting point is consciousness. If we forget that and try to work within the materialist framework, we tend to try to force-fit something like design into that framework while forgetting that the "intelligence" is the framework. Consciousness is the ground of being. Intelligence might be described as applied or creative consciousness. 

Tom Campbell describes what I am calling a framework as a Virtual Reality. Even staunch materialists like Neil deGrasse Tyson talk about living in a "simulation" except that, true to his materialist bias, he ascribes the intelligence behind the simulation to some super race of aliens and/or, as you mention, computers. We don't need to think of the ground of being as something that has itself been created (as in the super computer) because it is, by definition, the uncreated. The infinite and unlimited. To claim that it is something which was created applies limits - there must have been something to create it therefore we have at least two. To have two must mean that each has limits and can't, therefore, be infinite.

Sorry, I jumped in with a philosophical point which you are welcome to ignore and continue with your interesting debate. I couldn't resist as it is something I have been thinking about (again) recently.