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

[bennyboy]

This is a fucking joke right? Unless you ascribe to some form of dualism, consciousness is an emergent property of the brain by definition.

Not it's not. There are myriad other possibilities, some of them physical monist.

You can say you strongly think the mind is only an emergent property of the brain. But if you want to define it as such, you're just cheating.

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I was not making any claim for which I have no evidence. Only you are, if you claim that emergent materialism is a fact, not just a hypothesis, which has other alternatives, such as the theory of quantum mind.
And the idea of some "supermind" does not follow from quantum mind. Quantum mind is scientific theory, theory of "supermind is" piece of speculative metaphysics. I only maintain that neither such notion of "cosmic intelligent" is no nonsense. Scientific idea -- that it ain't.

In any case, you confuse notions of testability scientificity and reasonability.
Testability is the strongest notion: not all science can be testable, for science has to make some assumptions that are non-testable and at its limits it must include speculative elements. And not all non-science is unreasonable nor "pseudo- science" (unless it prtends to be science), for scope of current scientific knowledge never grasps everything, and one can make reasonabel non-scientific speculations about what is left6 outside (e.g. is universe infinite, are there alternative universes, etc). Such ideas can later insipire science, as it has frequently happened. The question of "supermind" belongs to this last subclass. It ain't science, I never said that.
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My claim is only that the evidence supports a purely materialistic mechanism.

Microtubules are still part of the brain structure, so that does not contradict the hypothesis that consciousness is brain-based and emergent.

I am not the least confused between reasonableness and testability. I am also not going to entertain ideas for which there is not only no evidence but no proposed mechanism, like matter being 'conscious all the way down'. Not reasonable, not testable.

Either I've been making strange posts in my sleep again, or you've misquoted.

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That's a great Sagan quote. Good post too. Thanks.

If something like the multiverse theory is in fact the case, I like to think of our Universe as some sort of quasi-organism that is in some Darwinian way competing with other Universes, perhaps to bring about the prevention of it's own death, although that's all very far out and I don't think of it much beyond a place of intrigue.

It's a neat idea, but with one problem: modern physics is at least as woo as the science it's supposed to be replacing.