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

[Neo-Scholastic]

And the additional burden for monism is explaining why some neural systems are associated with consciousness and others are not. There is clearly an additional process beyond just neural activity.

I think you are skirting dangerously close to the fallacy of composition here. The experimental evidence for NCC isn't invalidated because some neural networks cannot be shown to contribute to conscious events.

Until you can show a compositional difference between one set of neurons and another, both of which perform information process and of which only one is conscious, then you are presenting a 300 year old promissory note. How long can the materialist answer fail to deliver before it is considered a failure? The materialist approach to mind-body dates back to Newton! Physics has changed a lot since then, from classical ideas of particles bumping together to quantum processes. I fully accept the findings of neuroscience but do not accept interpretations that beg the question.