There is an arrogance to assuming that if conscious, sentient beings exist somewhere else in the universe, they’d probably look a lot like us. According to a new paper by philosophers Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California, Riverside, and Jeremy Pober of the University of Lisbon, if consciousness exists beyond Earth, it could take forms we can’t even imagine, and it might not even inhabit anything we’d recognize as a body.
Their argument, which they lay out in a working paper, centers on an idea called “substrate flexibility.” It means that just because humans have consciousness doesn’t mean all consciousness would be contained in a vessel that looks or functions or is even made up of the same stuff as us. Flesh, blood, neurons, or even carbon-based life — none of that may matter.
Consciousness, they theorize, could emerge from entirely different physical materials, just as long as the underlying system contains enough complexity to bring about that consciousness. Movie aliens are often humanoids, meaning they look a bit like us even if the details are remixed. Strange, unsettling, definitely not human, but Schwitzgebel and Pober argue that reality could produce something much stranger than fiction.
Earth Probably Isn’t the Template for All Life in the Universe
The evidence is the sheer scale of the observable universe, what with its estimated trillion galaxies and countless planets, at least some of which have to contain conscious life. If that has indeed happened, there’s a chance that life has evolved under radically different chemical conditions than we did, making it difficult to predict how those species would look since they would be following a completely different biological blueprint.
They’ve even come up with a fun name that will no doubt be used as a put-down in a science fiction novel at some point: terrocentrism, or the assumption that life on Earth is somehow the template for all life in the universe.
Humanity has a long, rich history of being arrogant about our knowledge of how everything works and then receiving a swift humbling that sets us in our place. There was a point when we once thought the entire universe literally revolved around us. Thinking that consciousness can come in a package that looks even a little bit like us is no different — a silly, self-centered idea just waiting to be shot down.