Dear Other Tink,
I think that this question (of whether everything has consciousness) is a valuable question, but not a meaningful one. Its value is that it leads us out of our comfortable assumptions into a non-dualistic way of understanding.
In other words, you cannot answer this question yes or no, just like you cannot specify an either/or answer to whether light is a wave or a particle. What you CAN do is ask, "What is going on with rocks?" And then just follow wherever that leads...such as the speculation in your article that the universe is built from the top down, the multiplicity descending out from oneness, rather than built by assembling tiny particles into bigger stuff.
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And the last sentence in the link is especially delightful!
“If you think about consciousness long enough, you either become a panpsychist or you go into administration.”