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According to the Copernican Principle in cosmology, we should assume that we do not occupy a special or privileged place in the cosmos, such as its exact center. According to the Anthropic Principle, we should be unsurprised to discover that we occupy a cosmological position consistent with the existence of intelligent life. The Anthropic Principle is a partial exception to the Copernican Principle: Even if cosmic locations capable of supporting intelligent life are extremely rare, and thus in a sense special, we shouldn't be surprised to discover that we are in such a location.

Now let's consider the following question: Is it surprising that Homo sapiens is a conscious species? On certain views of consciousness it would be surprising, and this surprisingness constitutes evidence against those views.

The views I have in mind are views on which conscious experience is radically separable from intelligent-seeming outward behavior. Views of this sort are associated with Ned Block and John Searle and more recently Susan Schneider -- though none of them commit to exactly the view I'll criticize today.

Let's stipulate the following: In our wide, maybe infinite, cosmos, living systems have evolved in a wide variety of different ways, with very different biological substrates. Maybe some life is carbon based and other life is not carbon based, and presumably carbon-based entities could take a variety of forms, some very unlike us. Let's stipulate also that some become sophisticated enough to form technological societies.

For concreteness, suppose that a thousand galaxies each host technological life for a thousand years. One hosts a technological society of thousand-tentacled supersquids whose cognitive processing proceeds by inference patterns of light in fiber-optic nerves. Another hosts a technological society of woolly-mammoth-like creatures whose cognition is implemented in humps containing a billion squirming ants. (For more detailed descriptions, see Section 1 of this paper.) Another hosts a technological society of high-pressure creatures who use liquid ammonia like blood. Etc.

Since these are technological societies, they engage in the types of complicated social coordination required to, say, land explorers on a moon. This will require structured communication: language, including, presumably, self-reports interpretable as reports of informational or representational states: "I remember that yesterday Xilzifa told me that the rocket crashed" or "I don't want to stop working yet, since I'm almost done figuring out this equation." (If advanced technology can arise without such communications, exclude such species from my postulated thousand.)

So then, we have a thousand societies like this, scattered across the universe. Now let's ask: Are the creatures conscious? Do they have streams of experience, like we do? Is there "something it's like" to be them?

Most science fiction stories seem to assume yes. I think that is also the answer we find intuitive. And yet, on certain philosophical views that I will call neurochauvinist, we should very much doubt that creatures so different from us are conscious. According to neurochauvinism, what's really special about us, which gives rise to conscious experience, is not our functional sophistication and complex patterns of environmental responsiveness but rather something about having brains like ours, with blood, and carbon, and neurons, and sodium channels, and acetylcholine, and all that.

Neurochauvinism can seem attractive when confronted with examples like Searle's Chinese Room or Block's China Brain -- complex systems designed to look from the outside like they are conscious and sophisticated (and which maybe implement computer-like instructions), but which are in fact basically just tricks. Part of the point of these examples is to challenge the common assumption that programmed robots, if they could someday be designed to behave like us, would be conscious. Consciousness, Block and Searle say, is not just a matter of having the right patterns of outward behavior, or even the right kinds of programmed internal, functional state transitions. Consciousness requires the specific biology of neurons -- or at least something in that direction. As Searle suggests, no arrangement of beer cans and wire, powered by windmills, could ever really have conscious experiences -- no matter how cleverly designed, no matter how sophisticated its behavior might seem when viewed from a distance. It's just not made of the right kind of stuff.

The neurochauvinist position as I am imagining it says this: We know that we are conscious. But those other aliens, made out of such different kinds of stuff, they're out of luck! Human biological neurons are what's special, and they don't have them. Although aliens of this sort might seem to be reporting on their mental states (remembering and wanting, in my example), really there is no more conscious experience there than there is behind the computer "memory" in your laptop or behind a non-player character in a computer game who begs you to save him from a dragon.

Now I don't think that Block or Searle are committed to such a strong view. Both allow that some hypothetical systems very different from us might be conscious, if they have the right kind of lower-level structures -- but they don't specify what exactly those structures must be or whether we should expect them to be rare or common in naturally-evolved aliens capable of sophisticated outward behavior.

So the neurochauvinist view is a somewhat extreme and unintuitive view. And yet philosophers and others do sometimes seem to say things close to it when they say that human beings are conscious not in virtue of their sophisticated behavior and environmental responsiveness but rather in virtue of the specifics of their underlying biological structures.

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Back to the Copernican Principle. If we alone have real conscious experiences and the 999 other technologically sophisticated alien species do not, then we do occupy a special region in the universe: the only region with conscious experiences. We are in a sense, super lucky! Of all the wild ways in which technological, linguistic, self-reporting creatures could evolve, we alone lucked in the neural basis of consciousness. Too bad for the others! Unlike us, they are as experientially blank as a computer or a stone.

If your theory of consciousness implies that Homo sapiens lucked into consciousness while all those other technological species missed out, it's got the same kind of weakness as does a theory that says, "yes, we're at the center of the universe, it just happened that way for no good reason, how strangely lucky for us!"

Now you could try to wiggle out of this by invoking the Anthropic Principle. You could say that we should be unsurprised to discover that we are in a region of the universe that supports consciousness, just like we should be unsurprised to discover that we aren't in any of the vast quantities of vacuum between the stars. The Anthropic Principle is sometimes framed in terms of "observers": We should expect to be in a region that can host observers. If only conscious entities count as observers, then it's unsurprising that we're conscious.

Now I think that the best understanding of "observer" for these purposes would be a functional or behavioral understanding that would include all technological alien species, but that seems like an argumentative quagmire, so let me respond to this concern in a different way.

Suppose that instead of a thousand technological species, there are a thousand and one: we who are conscious, 999 alien species without consciousness, and one other alien species with consciousness (they also lucked into neurons) who has secretly endured unobserved while observing all the other species from a distance. I will call this alien species the Unbiased Observers. They gaze with equanimity at the thousand others, evaluating them.

When this species casts its eye on Earth, will it see anything special? Anything that calls out, "Whoa, this planet is radically unlike the others!" As it looks at our language and our technology, will anything jump out that says here be consciousness while all the other linguistic and technological societies lack it? I see no reason to think so if we abide by the starting assumptions of neurochauvinism, that is, if we think that nonconscious entities could easily have sophisticated outward behavior and information processing similar to ours, and that what's really necessary for consciousness is not that but rather the low-level biological magic of neurons.

The Copernican Principle is then violated as follows: The Unbiased Observers should, if they understand the basis of consciousness, regard us as the one-in-a-thousand lucky species that chanced into consciousness. Even if the Unbiased Observers don't understand the basis of consciousness, it is still true that we are special relative to them -- sharing consciousness with them, alone among all the species in the universe that outwardly seem just as sophisticated and linguistic.

The Copernican Principle of Consciousness: Assume that there is no unexplained lucky relationship between our cognitive sophistication and our consciousness. Among all the actual or hypothetical species capable of sophisticated cognitive and linguistic behavior, it's not the case that we are among a small portion who also have conscious experiences.

Eric Schwitzgebel

http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-copernican-principle-of.html