Drawing on Copernican tradition,
philosophers argue for plausibility of other kinds of sentient life.
© Getty Images/Trifonov_Evgeniy
Does consciousness depend on flesh and blood?
The answer is almost certainly no, according to
Eric Schwitzgebel, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside.
In a new
working paper, Schwitzgebel and
Jeremy Pober, a former UCR graduate student who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lisbon, assert that
consciousness is likely possible in life forms made of much different stuff. Think of the five-limbed alien with a rock-like exterior in the recent blockbuster movie "
Project Hail Mary."
© University of California, RiversideEric Schwitzgebel.
Schwitzgebel and Pober do not attempt to define consciousness; they proceed from the heuristic premise that it's a real and recognizable phenomenon. Instead, they ask a narrower question: Must it be tied to the biology found on Earth?
The paper comes at a time when the question of conscious artificial intelligence looms large, fueling dreams and nightmares. The authors, who touch just briefly on the matter, do not take a firm position either way — and, in fact, diverge in their views. But the arguments they advance leave open the possibility that AI
could be conscious, though perhaps not in its current form.
At the heart of the paper's argument is the philosophical notion of "substrate flexibility." A property, such as the ability to hold water, is substrate flexible if it can be achieved with different kinds of materials. For example, a cup can be made of glass or plastic, a book can be printed on paper or stored electronically, and music can be encoded on vinyl records or servers.
Consciousness, Schwitzgebel and Pober argue, is also substrate flexible.
"The universe may contain minds stranger than we can imagine," Schwitzgebel said.
Comment: 8/10. Good advice in the main, but one should not close one's mind to the possibilities at the edges of reality.