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

[MindForgedManacle]

And if the Cyberboy 3000 describes its "experience?" Or Siri? We are getting close to the age in which instinctive hunches based on face shapes and body motions, or the formations of linguistic forms, are not guaranteed to represent actual sentience.

Well, once you can produce a strain of A.I. which can naturally and competently produce speech in a manner indistinguishable from an actual person, you might have a point. Sadly, they don't exist and even children wouldn't likely be fooled by even the most advanced ones developed.
Further, we have a complete understanding as to how these A.I. work. While psychology has advanced far, our knowledge of human psychology is not nearly comparable, aside from rather general assessments.

I'm still waiting for actual evidence. Other than an instinct-based hunch, what evidence can you provide that anything experiences qualia?

What evidence could you provide that the smoke you see in the distance is the result of a fire? Aside from the smoke itself, you could tell from the smell in the air, a general move by people away from the area, and/or the fact that you just saw an fire truck pass by and head in that direction. Are these guarantees that there's a fire making that smoke? No, but it's probabilistically favored. That's why we rightly assume that others have consciousness.

I'm not hanging my hat on anything except an unwillingness to conflate a philosophical argument (looks like me, so feels and thinks like me) with actual evidence (There's qualia, there's the brain, there's a lack of qualia, there's a lack of brain.)

You have a funny understanding of evidence then, which is information that makes a proposition more likely to be true than it would have been otherwise. The reason we think other people think and feel like us isn't merely "they look like me", it's because they behave like us and display more subtle signs of consciousness that are almost impossible to do consciously (subtle, subconsciously produced facial expressions are a prime example of this).

Science of the gaps, now, is it?

I declare it's not possible in the same way I declare it's not possible to see fairies. You declare it may be possible because you have faith in science. You've done a good job eliminating "yet" from these statements, but it's still lingering.

People love to say "science of the gaps" when they're saying something ridiculous. I've yet to see an example of "I don't know, therefore science". I have seen plenty of "We don't know yet, so we'll continue the science" and "It's a reasonable assumption that we believe X, Y and Z about consciousness".

This is both a strawman AND a false statement. First, I've never said nobody could ever learn more about qualia. I've said nobody could ever directly access qualia or prove that a given physical system actually had them rather than just seeming to.

Second, there have been many times in which science made no advancement-- those times in which scientific ideas were wrong.

I don't follow this. Even when you're wrong, you can make advancements. Alchemists were wrong, but they were the reason chemistry eventually blossomed. Newton was wrong on many things (the nature of space and time, his calculations of the solar system's orbits, etc.), but he practically cemented science as we know it as a legitimate discipline.

No. Because in this thread, the philosophical argument is made that an entity SEEMING to be conscious is sufficient evidence to believe that it really is.

Funnily enough, this water I'm drinking SEEMS to be water, but I can't be certain, so I probably shouldn't drink it...

You can suspect whatever you want. However, until you can actually show that qualia exist empirically, rather than by making philosophical assumptions about physical correlates of consciousness, you are engaged in philosophy, not science.

What I'm more interested in is why you think philosophical zombies are metaphysically possible. All you've really done so far is assert that they're epistemically possible, and then you make this unsupported leap that we should take them seriously as an actual metaphysical possibility.