The internet is already a network with 'all that hardware'.
Why isn't the internet conscious?
Why isn't the internet conscious?
There is nothing magical about this: consciousness is obviously a complex computational process that has evolved over millions or billions of years. It is a good solution to the problem of navigating the world as a living thing.
Saying 'you need an extremely complex computational system to have consciousness' does not entail that any extremely complex computational system is conscious (incidentally, this is also the mistake that the integrated information people make).
And so about your physical body, a collection of atoms can 'try' to do something?
'Trying' is a function of conscious intent. So you can't 'try' to be conscious, that would be a prerequisite.
"consciousness is obviously ..."
Glib statement of the century.
"It is a good solution to the problem of navigating the world as a living thing."
Only conscious, living things can have 'problems', ergo, your statement is again circuitously referential.
If as you say 'there is nothing magical' then there can never be 'intent' or 'problems' to solve - it's a pretty big giant contradiction.
There would just be 'bags of particles bouncing around, randomly' that's it. In the context of materialism, then there isn't even anything such as 'evolution' - just the appearance of it. Atoms bounce around from one thing to the next, randomly, we just call it a 'process' - but it's not, so long sticking to materialism (i.e. no magic).
" 'you need an extremely complex computational system to have consciousness' does not entail that any extremely complex computational system is conscious"
Sure. But the totality of technology on the planet is already very well connected and 'sufficient' (according to the OP's indicated scale) so as to form the basis of some kind of 'network', which, while may not be 'conscious', should nevertheless exhibit some of the emergent properties of such a thing, if emergence does come out of those kinds of configurations.
Things in the world behave the way they behave regardless of our interpretations of them. Electrons were bound to nuclei long before consciousness observed and named these phenomena. Bacteria and archaea looked for sustenance and reproduced and suffered changes and adapted the same way billions of years before any consciousness existed in the world. They were 'trying' to survive just as much as we are - you can express this in principle in terms of a physical law just as much as the motion of the Electron wave, but we don't know that law and use a human word, "trying", instead.
As evolution happened according to the laws of chemistry and statistics, biological beings became more and more complex, and found more and more complex ways of interacting with the world. At some point(s), simple agents capable of planning were born from a previous generation, and these created more offspring than previous organisms, so this trait became more and more pronounced. After eons of this process, these planning abilities started including information not just about the environment, but about other living things, agents (the behavior of such things is not well explained by basic mechanical laws). Over more time, this same logic circuit probably started being applied to model the behavior of the entity doing the planning, which is probably what we recognize as self-reflection, experiences, consciousness.
Of course, there are many things in my account that may turn out to be inaccurate. I'm not claiming to understand the exact evolution of consciousness - I'm only giving a somewhat vaguely plausible explanation of consciousness as a physical, evolved phenomenon. We don't know how to model evolution, we have no idea how life began from anorganic compounds, we don't know to what extent evolution could have produced different results than we see today.
Also, while concepts like 'life' and 'agents' and 'objects' are human categories imposed on a fuzzy world, that does not mean that these concepts are arbitrary or that they are purely fabrications of the human mind. It is an objective fact of the world that the laws that describe the motion of a rock tumbling down a slope are different from the laws that describe the motion of a gazelle running down a slope. Any being or computer that wanted to predict the speed or position of the gazelle and the rock would fail to do so if it didn't account for this difference.
Another important note that many reductionists seem to not accept is that a computer computes regardless of a conscious mind interpreting this computation. If we find a physical process that moves a block of wood in response to certain patterns of light hitting a seminconducting crystal, that system is a computer using a camera to open a door, regardless of whether it happened naturally or was designed by a designer. This was the great insight that Turing and Church came up with: that computation is a mathematical object that is isomorphic to any system with certain simple properties.
This observation is so fundamental that we can actually deduce limits of physical processes by modeling them as computations: for example, we know that certain crystals need some minimum time to grow a certain way because the physical laws that cause the crystals to grow are isomorphic to a known optimization problem. Since we know the minimum complexity of a computer solving that problem (the minimum number of steps that need to happen) we also know that the physical processes must take at least [time(step) * number of steps] time to grow the crystals.
For the internet, the explanation is simple again: there is no equivalence between the evolutionary laws that led to consciousness evolving and any process used in the design of the internet, so we have no reason to expect the internet to be conscious. Again, some level of complexity is necessary but not sufficient for consciousness to emerge, in the materialist theories of consciousness. There are very few people (notably, the IIT people) that equate complexity with consciousness.