The Copernican Argument for Alien Consciousness; The Mimicry Argument Against Robot Consciousness
arXiv Preprint Archive November 12, 2024 Eric Schwitzgebel, Jeremy Pober
On Copernican grounds, we should default assume that behaviorally sophisticated extraterrestrial entities would be conscious, because otherwise humans would be implausibly lucky to have consciousness while similar aliens lack it. However, this default assumption is canceled for entities designed to mimic superficial features of human consciousness, such as many current and near-future robots. These two arguments—the Copernican and Mimicry Arguments—defeat a parity principle that would apply the same behavioral tests to aliens and robots. The approach relies on epistemic principles of Copernican mediocrity and inference to the best explanation, remaining neutral about specific metaphysical theories of consciousness.