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

[bennyboy]

I cannot know for sure that any other entity, human or otherwise, actually experiences qualia. I cannot see your thoughts, or interact with them. I cannot see, for example, what red looks like to you.

One does not experience qualia; qualia are the experiences.

Once one accepts that another is conscious, then it follows that that other has qualia. The argument is whether our qualia are alike or not.

I couldn't agree more:

I would agree that qualia are, by definition, an aspect of consciousness. But then I'd realize that you are using a definition of consciousness that has already been repurposed to fit into the physical monist world view: states of brain function, fMRI scans, etc. and not the subjective experience that consciousness really refers to.

. . . with apologies if I overstepped your original intent. I've become very suspicious of subjective words in the context of physicalist arguments, as they are rarely accepted to mean what I take them to mean. To me, "conscious" always meant having qualia, even before I learned (in a forum argument, of course) about that word-- so it is quite annoying to hear people say things like "anything capable of interacting with its environment is conscious," and then use an equivocation on the two meanings to reinforce ideas like "qualia are just brain chemistry."

I do like one of the implications of the way you are wording things, though: the idea that a person doesn't HAVE qualia, but IS qualia. Because I think almost everyone will agree that a person who ceases ever to be conscious again has ceased to exist.

(back to OP)
In some sense, it is the influence of scientific ideas that makes me like the idea of universal consciousness-- somehow, with the princicple of conservation it makes sense that a primitive awareness is intrinsic to all the universe, and that human awareness is merely a molding of some of it into a temporary unified form. To me, this is much less far fetched than the idea that there was for billions of years a universe ticking blindly along its mechanical course, and then due to the statistical accidents of evolution, the subjective perspective just happened to pop into existence.