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Phoenix
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It's not very different from what was known to ancient peoples. That is, the (now deemed archaic) belief that there are spirits present and responsible for governing the movement of the heavens, the seasons, the forces of nature, etc. In the modern sense when someone says spirit often the idea of some kind of ghost, angel, or demon comes to mind, but in the general sense it simply refers to an intelligence that exists outside of an animal body. Your tribal peoples typically believe that spirits are everywhere and in everything. The idea of a conscious universe is not difficult for them to believe because from their perspective life is in everything.
Here's a different angle on this, if you want to throw a little logic into the picture. It is known and understood that living things made of matter can and do give rise to what you know as consciousness. Consciousness while accepted as existing is very difficult to pin down as to what exactly it is. You know you're conscious, and you're aware of when you have not been conscious for some time, yet what is it exactly? That's something philosophers, theologists, and scientists have yet to answer though they grapple with it constantly. The cause of consciousness, however, can be rooted in one of two things. Either consciousness is a simple function of physical matter, or it comes from "somewhere else", a different kind of existence, and is linked into the physical world. The second possibility I will not explore here as it is enough to maintain "somewhere else" as an undefined, so I will focus instead on the first possibility.
If consciousness is a simple function of physical matter, then it is no different from any other physical force and thus is goverened entirely by physical laws. Consciousness then being existent within and confined to an animal brain is simply the only form of consciousness known to man, but it would be entirely possible that consciousness could arise from any kind of matter depending upon its arrangement. You could have, say, stellar nebulae or maybe even galaxies themselves being massive, living beings. Life in such a form would not be readily understood by man as it would be extremely difficult to relate to or recognize an intelligence working on such a vast scale and over extreme measurements of time simply because it would require a long time to observe. A simple action such as trying to say hello might take millenia. Since consciousness itself cannot be quantified but only the results of it acting within animal life forms being the observable part, it is the effects of intelligent action that man has to rely on to attempt to identify it. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, this vastly limits the scope on which man can observe any kind of intelligence at work. This is of course assuming that intelligence is a simple function of physical matter. If not, well, as I said, that is a whole other subject entirely.
What is most interesting about the universe is that life can exist at all. Chemically it does not make sense, since chemical processes do not tend to create complex organized structures capable of what living creatures do. The criteria for life as you know it existing are extremely limited. Too much or too little heat, too much or too little of one element or another, and it doesn't work. Consider the temperatures that most chemical reactions necessary for life take place at. Below 0 C, water freezes. At 100 C, it boils. The universe can range from -273 C (absolute zero) to 10,000,000 C at the center of the sun where hydrogen fuses into helium, to 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 C, the theorized temperature when the universe began according to the Big Bang theory. Yet, life doesn't work too well outside a very, very small range of temperature. Technically life is unnecessary for the universe to function. Why does the universe need life? Yet it's there none the less, some of it typing on this keyboard right now. When you talk of information, the amount of information stored within the DNA of a living creature is staggering. Man's most advanced supercomputers cannot process what happens every second at the cellular molecular level, and that's just the beginning of it. The cellular machinery involved in processing DNA to generate RNA and protein chains is so intricate that humans have never created any machinery even close to that level of perfect function, and at such a small scale. Consider that there are trillions of cells in a complex living organism, that form complex structures such as bones, organs, and tissues, that repair damage, process raw materials, replace themselves, and all of this starts from one single cell, with one set of DNA instructions, and this dance of cellular formation, replication, termination, and replacement must work perfectly quadrillions of times over for a single living creature to live out its natural life span. Have you ever seen a large animal up close, or marveled over the skeleton of a dinosaur? And yet, like yourself, it began as something so small you could not see it, and even that was not its true beginning as life is an unbroken, continuous chain - one organism begetting another, and another, all related and all connected. Life itself could be looked at as one continuous organism of immense complexity. You could consider the entirety of life on earth as the single most complex, continuous chemical reaction in the known universe, and yet this chemical reaction is capable of studying itself and analyzing itself, cataloging information about itself and reflect upon it. It is staggering to contemplate, is it not?
When you look at life and the information involved in just keeping living things going at the cellular level, that a conscious being like yourself does not even have to think about in order to keep it running, then consider that your conscious mind is involved in actively making decisions to keep this process going that without modern microscopes you would not even know about, and all the complex structures of a living creature that grow from this information happening at the cellular level, is it not something to marvel at? And yet, this is only one form of life, on one planet, in one solar system, in one galaxy, in one known universe, at one time in an unknown span of existence. The entire universe itself might be conscious, and perhaps conscious of itself. Is it really that much of a stretch from what the ancient shaman believed about a Great Spirit that stretched across all the heavens, to the Christian concept of the Holy Spirit of God being omnipresent in everything and everywhere, to the notion that the universe itself might be a vast organized structure that is itself alive? For if intelligence and information can be stored in a brain, and if a brain can imagine and dream and grasp at ideas, who is to say that perhaps all of this universe is not just a fantasy? Could it be the dream or imagining of some being so vast in intelligence and complexity and scope that we smaller things could not possible contemplate any more than the amoeba could understand this present universe of which it to is a part of? And what if after eons of time by human standards this being were to awaken, and the dream end, or the imagining be discarded like so many flights of fancy or passing daydreams of children on a summer day? If one could learn only one thing from studying the universe, it should be humility.
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