Beneficial behavior for systems/organisms dont require consciousness - most do better with less, looking at western nihilism...
Consciousness is just knowledge / conscientiousness with a loop, some garbage collection, and a generally meta-reflective process of self-directed improvement by learning from mistakes and using what works.
Mesa/super selective processes then test these individual instances en masse.
Entities dont need true understanding, just approximation.
Rain dances may not work, but they still increase reproductive odds.
Lamarck was right, but for the wrong reasons, which is apt.
The giraffe that stretches its neck convincingly (or wears high heels) and the giraffe that is naturally tall converge over generations as the female giraffes cannot differentiate between the two.
As for the medium that the oscillations permeate, it is all of them, and they all have an effect on each other.
The flooding of the Nile, the lunar affliction on our hormones, astronomical bombardment,pest blooms, the chances of bring born on a Saturday, agricultural invention, the distinctions in blood types, etc: are all seemingly unrelated things had the celestial mechanisms orchestrating their (near) periodic nature not been known - until modernity.
Yet, before modernity, these (near) cyclic phenomena were known about, and described, just 'mis'attributed as supernatural / God of the Gaps.
("Panem-synchronicity")
The forces are all substrates for complexity. The underlying force, as Hawking told us, was gravity.