Does it make sense to speak of "Universal Consciousness" or "Universal Intelligence"?

[bennyboy]

No, that doesn't make sense. The evidence points to consciousness being an emergent property of a complex assemblage of matter, not the matter itself.

This isn't right, IMO. The "evidence" we have that some things are conscious is based on their behavior, and our philosophical willingness to believe that objects that exhibit certain behaviors are "really" conscious.

We cannot scientifically test for consciousness. We can only scientifically test for markers that we have already chosen to believe represent consciousness. This is fine when determining if Grammy is conscious, but does not contribute meaningfully to philosophical arguments about whether the Cyberboy 3000 is really conscious, or whether some primitive kind of atomic consciousness is associated with all matter.