Carlos Solis
Consciousness, put simply, is the aspect of being that answers the question “what is it like” — for example, you can meaningfully ask how a person or a donkey feels, but you can’t meaningfully ask what a table or a cup “experiences.” In recent years some researchers have argued that consciousness might arise outside a narrow set of biological systems.
A Copernican Principle for Consciousness
Professor Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California and Dr. Jeremy Pober of the University of Lisbon suggest applying a Copernican idea to consciousness. Just as Nicolaus Copernicus showed that Earth does not occupy a privileged spot in the cosmos, they argue we should not assume human consciousness is special without evidence.
Pober says, “The spirit of the Copernican principle is that we should regard ourselves as special only when the evidence supports it, not by default.” He adds that we have many reasons to think humans are the smartest creatures on Earth, but no reason to assume we’re the smartest in the universe. Applied to consciousness, Pober argues there is no reason to insist that experience strictly requires flesh and blood.
Schwitzgebel puts it even more directly: “The universe may contain minds stranger than we can imagine.”
Searching for Life — and Other Possible Minds
If consciousness truly does not depend on a specific biochemistry, the range of entities that could be conscious expands dramatically. The authors run an estimate: even if complex civilizations arise in only one galaxy out of a billion, that would still yield more than 1,000 such civilizations scattered across time and space. Given the variety of conditions in the universe, many of those civilizations could be radically different from us.
They point to science-fiction examples — like the character Rocky from Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary and the Horta from Star Trek — to show that thinking beings could be based on different chemistry or materials. Some astrobiologists have already suggested the possibility of carbon-based life with alternative biochemistry, or of organisms living in the clouds of Venus where sulfur could play a much larger metabolic role.
Could Artificial Intelligence Be Conscious?
The authors don’t draw a single conclusion about whether AI or other systems could necessarily become conscious. Jeremy Pober is skeptical that we should be too permissive when defining which substrates can support consciousness. He says, “There are good reasons to think some alien biochemical systems are capable of consciousness,” but he adds that the boundary of substrate flexibility might not include things radically different from us, such as silicon chips or microcircuits.
Professor Schwitzgebel, by contrast, argues that philosophers have focused too narrowly on whether silicon can simply reproduce the human brain instead of asking the broader question of which systems in general can be conscious. If you abandon the assumption that consciousness requires human biology, Schwitzgebel says, it becomes harder to justify excluding silicon systems just because of the material they are made from.
Mind-Uploading and Digital Immortality
This debate overlaps with transhumanist ideas about preserving the mind and “uploading” a person into a computer. Ray Kurzweil, a well-known technologist, predicts the possibility of transferring a brain into digital form by 2045. Other approaches range from digitally emulating memories to services such as Nectome, which offers brain preservation for long-term storage.
Those proposals have sharp critics. Neuroscientist Michael Hendricks told MIT that such ideas are “a joke.” He said he hopes future generations will be outraged by how the wealthy diverted resources into attempts to live forever at the expense of their descendants, and he called supporters of these projects “cartoon villains.”
Miguel Nicolelis offered a much stronger scientific objection: in his view the brain resists algorithmic reproduction, and no engineering effort will produce its kind of living consciousness. He argues that even massive computational resources do not guarantee the emergence of subjective experience.
Schwitzgebel and Pober emphasize that we should not rule out consciousness in systems that are very different from humans. That position widens the philosophical and scientific space for research into consciousness, the search for life, and the ethics of how we treat potentially conscious systems. At the same time, the question of which physical or informational structures can generate experience remains the subject of intense debate and empirical testing.
Based on reporting in the Daily Mail
