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

[Chas]

That's rather anthropocentric. So, there can be no alien consciousness? No other self-aware intelligence in the entire cosmos?

I said that there's a reason to believe that only organic brains of living organisms, as opposed to artificial silicon non-living ones, are required for qualia. I didn't say I believe it to be reality.

Let's avoid the word self-aware. I think there's an equivocation embedded in it that's best avoided. To me, self-aware means having self-qualia-- the experience of what it's like to be oneself. I do not accept the ability to respond to the environment as sufficient-- but many people use "self-aware" in that context, as well.

I can agree that self-aware means the same as having/experiencing qualia.

My question would be this-- how do you KNOW something is self-aware, rather than just a complex machine without qualia? What are the criteria, and are they philosophically sufficient? In a nutshell, my problem with all of this discussion is that there are no philosophically sufficient descriptions of qualia which are also physically testable, and that appeals to "evidence" on either side fail not becuase there's a lack of evidence, but because we have no capacity either to perceive it or to recognize it.

You keep saying that qualia are beyond the reach of science, but that is an unsupported assertion. You don't know that to be true.

It seems to be beyond our current science, but a clever experimenter might figure out how to test it tomorrow or future technologies might make it straightforward.

And I don't know what you mean by 'philosophically sufficient'.
Philosophy doesn't give us answers, it helps us ask questions and clarify our thinking.