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

[pocaracas]

Did you see that TED talk I put up earlier?
I'm on my phone, so you're going to have to go back a page or two to find it.
Towards the end of that talk, there's a nice little experiment where an electromagnetic pulse is shown to (on some cases) perturb your decision making process...

I think the brain science is very cool. I think you linked some things about selective brain damage as well, right? With all my philosophical complaints with physicalism as a philosophy, the fact that you can mess with my brain and make interesting things happen to my experience is undeniable.

Do I sense a hint of acknowledgement that your qualia can be "reliably" influenced by a direct electromagnetic impulse to the brain?

But my question is how would you determine if a non-Earth-animal physical structure had qualia? How can you even determine if a human really has qualia rather than just behaving like he/she does? With humans, there's always the implicit assumption-- we already believe people to be conscious so we just start seeing what the brain's doing. But how would you go about testing other things?

Depends on their physiology, I guess....