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

[bennyboy]

Why are you invoking technology here? Future AI and subsequent boundaries for sentience is an entirely different discussion.

My intention is to show that the belief in other-qualia is a philosophical choice mediated by instinct, rather than a physical fact.

Given the Cyberboy 3000 could sufficiently imitate human behavior-- including apparent emotional responses-- many people might be willing to think it was actually sentient. But the philosophical question would still be there-- how could we establish that destroying such an entity involved the destruction of a sentient being, rather than just the dismantling of a machine?

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Further, we have a complete understanding as to how these A.I. work.

I accepted this at face value the first time I read your post. But now, I'm not so sure. We can know the mechanism of the A.I.-- the type of ram and CPU etc, as well as the algorithms programmed into the system.

However, the really good stuff might end up being hidden in the complex relationships between nodes-- i.e. in the information. And that is one theory of consciousness-- that it is a function of information flow, rather than the medium that carries it.

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There is no such thing as a "type" of thing science is designed to investigate. Science in principle investigate all type of things. What science does do differently from everything else is to insist upon reliability of its own investigation by insisting on rigorous verification of its own results.

I don't think that description of science is complete. You should add that the "rigorous verification" must be doable by a third party.

So let's take the hypothesis that I am a sentient entity-- by which I mean that I experience qualia, rather than just seeming to. How are you going to investigate my claim?

Let me answer this question, and see if you disagree with me. You will look to other claims of sentience, establish what correlate properties were involved (brain chemistry, blood flow, etc.), and see if those same properties are involved in my own processing of information.

This is all fine, and can produce much useful knowledge. But it is not sufficient to establish that I'm not a philosophical zombie. That part can only be assumed, and there's no reason to believe that will ever change.