I have been thinking about the science behind Dust and something interesting came to mind.

So they are nanomachines who can cause varied effects, but a common theme is the gift of conciousness to species that were not self concious yet, and the enhancement of heroes.

So basically a non self concious creatures gains self counciousness and already councious creatures gains better mental capabilities (the craver heroes seems to abandon their hivemind, others have better skills at commanding etc).

What could possibly happen is that Dust is invading the creature brain and each unit, once it recognises the brain patters, becomes and acts like a neuron. Probably not any type of neuron, but a specific one, the mirror neuron, or cubelli neuron. They fire when the creature acts and when the creature observes the same action performed by another creature. 

Some researches argue that these neurons are important to understand the actions of other people, while others say it gives language capabilities, or empathy, and some even speculate it can give self-awareness.

So if some creatures from a random species get infected by Dust, they will become self-aware through Dust inserted in their brain working as mirror neurones. Dust don´t need to infect all the creatures. The enhanced ones will eventually become the dominant ones because of the theory of evolution. And Dust can replicate itself during a pregnancy and install itself on a fetus brain to keep the species intelligence enhanced through generations.

In the case of Dust accidents, most creatures, already Dust infected, get a sensorial and psychic overload and their brain shuts down. Some fortunate ones manage to survive the experience and have an even bigger Dust platform running on their brain, eventually becoming heroes...

And now this is the curious conclusion that I had from that theory: the Virtuals already won over the Concrete. Since your mind is now running on a Dust server inside your brain, you already virtualised yourself. You still have a concrete body, but your mind is already virtual (and this is why the Broken Lords and Vodyani survives without an organic body, they only need Dust to maintain their neuronal activity).

I think you're right about this, and working in concert with existing neurons is how dust interacts with people. The interesting question to me is whether or not dust itself is capable of independent intelligence if enough of it gets collected together. Dust doesn't appear to be exercising much will of its own in the galaxy, just drifting around and then getting directed by intelligent creatures who use it. However, it does seem possible that a large enough collection of dust could form a computer or brain all on its own. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a critical part of the Virtuals' technology - storing their minds in dust-based computer systems. However, the Virtual Endless were takiing existing personalities and writing them onto blank slates, not an empty computer developing self awareness on its own. Does an individual particle of dust have some sort of basic mission coded into it, or does it just float around until acted on by an outside force? Most of the hero backgrounds indicate that exposure to large amounts of pure dust can potentially be lethal to people, so it seems like dust just reacts with whatever it touches and sometimes that happens to be a creature with the capacity for thought. Heroes all seem to largely retain their individual personalities and values, rather than pursuing some mission motivated by the dust.

However, I think your basic premise is very much correct. Maybe not specifically neurons, since dust is versatile. When a piece of it is in a brain it behaves like a neuron, and when a particle of dust is in a computer it behaves like a transistor. They have the capacity for information storage and processing, and there seems to be no limit to what dust can interface with. I don't believe we have yet seen a quest where dust develops a mind of its own, though. It's possible the Lost designed it that way on purpose, so their tool would stay as a tool instead of developing its own agenda. However, I always thought a cool idea for a faction would be a hyper-concentrated lode of dust developing self awareness, and producing a dust faction who believes it must liberate its non-awakened cousins from their slavery at the hands of other races.

Lemonwizard wrote:

The interesting question to me is whether or not dust itself is capable of independent intelligence if enough of it gets collected together. Dust doesn't appear to be exercising much will of its own in the galaxy, just drifting around and then getting directed by intelligent creatures who use it.

That is a very interesting scenario. Dust have been gathered in immense quantity by Dust focused empires (Broken Lords and Roving Clans in EL, the Lumeris in ES), but no sign of independent AI rising from it. 

And does it have a specific goal? It doesn´t seem so (apart from its enhancement of creatures operations). And that´s the scary part. Maybe the Virtuals coded a goal or something similar in Dust. That is implied on the Heretic goal of ridding Dust from Virtual corruption... and then making Dust agenda free as the Lost intended it to be?