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

[bennyboy]

"We don't yet have an answer" is not equivalent to "It's a failure".

Unless your system has proven capable of answer a particular category of question, then "We don't YET have an answer" is a statement of faith. There's no YET, because there is no milestone which determines whether science can solve this question. That science has solved some problems is not evidence that it can solve questions like cosmogony or psychogony.

And I didn't say physical monism fails because it hasn't yet explained why mind exists rather than not. I said it fails because talking about mind in a physical monist model requires defining mind as what it is not: chemistry, blood flow, etc. That's not what mind is. Mind is the subjective experience of qualia. The other things are correlates that we have chosen to look for, because we have no good way to determine what structures are/aren't experiencing qualia.

I would accept a physical structure as conscious by its behavior, not by particulars of its structure.

That's right. You have to, because nobody can see or interact directly with a mind, and you don't want to do science about fairies, IPUs, mind, or other intangible things that nobody can even see. The problem is that as mental beings we do in fact know that minds exist. It's not the mind's fault that a particular world view cannot readily adapt to its reality and obvious existence. But you have a problem: some things may behave in ways that make them seem human (or will, very soon, with AI); also, some beings experience which exhibit no noticeable behaviors at all-- some coma patients, for example.

Physical monism is the only theory with any supporting evidence. Nothing else has any at all.

That sounds great until you realize that you are talking about a standard of evidence which requires everything being defined in terms that fit into the theory you are supposedly using the evidence to investigate. That's exactly the definition of "begging the question."

Again, the fact that some things are not well-suited to be obects of scientific study is not their failure. The instistence that they be redefined to "fit in," however, is a failure-- to accept reality. There's irony there, because science is supposed to be a tool for objective inquiry-- not the imposition of philsophical beliefs on direct observgation.