Anyone who saw the blockbuster sci-fi film “Project Hail Mary” will remember Rocky, a creature unlike anything we’ve seen on Earth.
The five-legged alien is composed of a rock-like material, hence its nickname, and comes from a fictional planet where temperatures and a high-pressure ammonia-dominant atmosphere has driven evolution in a radically different direction (still, he’s a cool guy.)
The idea of such different yet conscious being is a fun thought experiment. And according to University of California philosophy professor Eric Schwitzgebel and University of Antwerp postdoctoral fellow Jeremy Pober, it may not be quite as far-fetched as it sounds.
In what can only be described as a vape cloud of a working paper, the pair examine the possibility of other consciousnesses that take on forms far beyond conventional imagination, arising from wildly different materials than those found on Earth. They argue that given the vastness of space, life could take dramatically different forms elsewhere.
“Suppose your best guess estimate is that, on Earth, consciousness is present in all vertebrates, plus cephalopods and some insects,” they wrote. “And suppose that your best guess estimate is that on average each galaxy contains a million planets where species of approximately that level of behavioral sophistication eventually evolve (even if technological civilizations rarely arise).”
“The observable universe would then host, over its lifetime, a quintillion qualifying planets,” they added. “With that many draws from the lottery, some of these life forms will be strange indeed.”
The team examined a fundamental concept in philosophy called “substrate flexibility,” which describes how the same materials can have multiple different properties. For instance, a cup can be made from a litany of different materials and still successfully contain liquid.
In their paper, Schwitzgebel and Pober argue consciousness could also be “substrate flexible,” meaning that it doesn’t have to be made out of conventional carbon-based flesh and blood.
“The universe may contain minds stranger than we can imagine,” said Schwitzgebel in a statement.
The pair argue that assuming organisms like the ones found on Earth are the only way to develop consciousness would be “terrocentrism,” the unjustified assumption that life on Earth is the only way consciousness can form.
“There will likely be different, complex and intermeshing functional relationships from small-scale chemical bonding up to large-scale functional differences in sensory, memory, and affective systems,” the paper reads. “To think that somehow, among this diversity, only entities with our particular architecture and functionality would be conscious, would be unmotivated terrocentrism.”
The researchers’ line of thinking could also have implications for the current discussions surrounding the much-debated possibility of AI becoming conscious. After all, AI models don’t have any physical body to begin with, which would make any conscious AI an entity entirely different than the ones we’ve come accustomed to.
But the subject appears to have been divisive among the two researchers. While Pober argued that “until we have reason to believe otherwise, we should assume that our current computer chips cannot realize consciousness, Schwitzgebel admitted that “we should be open” to the idea.
In short, it’s a defiant rebuke to human exceptionalism. In cosmology, the Copernican mediocrity principle states that humanity doesn’t occupy a privileged position in the universe and that there isn’t anything inherently unique about how life on Earth came to be.
In a similar vein, consciousness must exist in other forms we haven’t even dreamed of yet, the researchers argue.
“Given that it’s likely that functionally complex, behaviorally sophisticated entities have arisen or will arise many times in the observable universe, in diverse substrates,” the researchers concluded, “we argue that it would be a violation of a principle of Copernican mediocrity to hold that among these diverse entities, only we, or only we and a small proportion of others who share our substrate, are conscious.”
More on consciousness: Neuroscientist Says We’re All Wrong About Root of Consciousness in Our Brains
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