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

[pocaracas]

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.

Granted that none of these have yet displayed consciousness (possibly due to lack of complexity on the implementation which depends on the current technology), but this is just to show how different neural networks can be made to tackle different tasks.

This is a perceptron neural network, meant for classification tasks:


This is a Hopfield neural network, dedicated to model human memory:


There are other types of Artificial Neural Networks, but these two should be enough to provide a hint that different brain structures may be related to different tasks. Different animals possess these structures in different amounts, which leads to different complexities in the tasks they can process.

This is what I view as the most likely scenario to account for brain function. Sure, it's still not proven one way or the other, so you're free to disagree.