Time to Stop Being Human-Centric About Consciousness

EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster––Humans have a habit of assuming we're special.

We thought Earth was the center of the universe. Then we thought our Sun was. Then our galaxy. Science has repeatedly humbled us.

Now two philosophers want to deliver another cosmic ego check: maybe consciousness itself—the nature of which has been highly contested—isn't unique to brains like ours.

“To not give it the benefit of the doubt would be to argue that our insides are special.” philosopher Dr. Jeremy Pober told Milky Way News. The “it”, he said, is the possibility that beings besides humans are conscious in non-human ways.

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In a new draft paper, philosophers Pober at the University of Lisbon and Eric Schwitzgebel at University of California, Riverside argue that consciousness is probably substrate flexible—meaning that subjective experience doesn't have to emerge only from human-style biology, or even from anything that inhabits Earth for that matter. They argue that if the universe is teeming with complex life, built from wildly different chemistry, it’s actually arrogant to assume only creatures made exactly like us can have an inner life.

The paper, posted to Schwitzgebel's UC Riverside faculty page, hasn't yet been peer-reviewed. But even in draft form, it plants a philosophical stake about how narrow our sense of consciousness might be.

Their argument doesn’t rely on science fiction or silicon robots replacing human brains. Instead, it starts with a surprisingly simple idea: statistically, we're probably not that special. The authors borrow inspiration from the Copernican Principle—the scientific idea that humans shouldn't assume we occupy a privileged position in the universe.

“We have to come up with something that has a broader scope that could be conscious,” said Pober. “We shouldn't expect that we're special without more evidence.”

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After all, Nicolaus Copernicus showed us Earth wasn't the center of everything. The authors expand from this to what they call the “Copernican Principle of Consciousness”: among intelligent, behaviorally sophisticated beings, we shouldn't assume humans are uniquely blessed with conscious experience, or that human consciousness is the only kind.

The paper spends considerable time explaining why alien life probably wouldn't all look like carbon-copy Earth organisms. Scientists have already proposed plausible biochemistries that differ from ours. Some hypothetical organisms might use different amino acids, different genetic molecules, different solvents instead of water, or even rely heavily on silicon in ways Earth's life doesn't.

But this isn't the old “silicon-based aliens” trope from science fiction. In fact, the authors note that fully silicon-based life appears chemically unlikely. But plenty of other chemical combinations remain scientifically plausible.

Coming back down to Earth, Pober explained the concept of umwelt, which describes the unique subjective experience beings have, given the priorities of their organismic design. He is a dog lover, so he started with them.

“Smell is primary to them, not sight,” he said.

Take a second to think about how smell is different from sight. We experience objects as we are able to, and smell lingers in a way that light doesn't. That means that for dogs, objects really appear differently: “Objects then can crawl around corners, because smells do in a way that light doesn't. That would be a difference in consciousness.”

As another thought experiment, think about how an octopus’s eight multipurpose limbs would affect its sense of consciousness compared to ours. If life itself can arise from different chemistry, then eventually any alien organisms out there might evolve nervous systems (or something functionally similar) that support consciousness.

Much of today's debate about AI consciousness revolves around a famous philosophical thought experiment. Imagine replacing each neuron in your brain with a perfectly functioning silicon chip. If you replaced every neuron one by one, would “you” still be conscious?

Critics argue this wouldn't work because real neurons do much more than simply pass electrical signals. They depend on complex chemistry, blood flow, glial cells, and countless microscopic biological interactions. Pober and Schwitzgebel actually agree that these critics have a point.

But they say everyone has been asking the wrong question.

Instead of wondering whether a silicon copy of your brain could produce human consciousness, they ask something broader: could different kinds of conscious minds emerge from entirely different biological systems? From dogs to octopuses, beings on Earth already experience the world with a brain radically unlike ours. Why stop there?

One could see how this could quickly lead us to the conclusion that AI has been conscious all along. Interestingly, the paper doesn't conclude that.

Pober argues we should remain skeptical until we have positive evidence that current computer hardware can support consciousness. Schwitzgebel is more open to the possibility, arguing that once we abandon the idea that consciousness requires specifically human biology, it becomes harder to rule out artificial systems on purely material grounds. Either way, both agree that today's AI hasn't yet earned an automatic ticket into the “definitely conscious” club.

Still, assuming everything from alien species to AI is merely a sophisticated zombie while humans alone possess genuine experience would make Earth seem cosmically exceptional once again.

History hasn't been kind to that assumption.