Hot off the press at Phil Imprint! "The Copernican Argument for Alien Consciousness; the Mimicry Argument Against Robot Consciousness", with @JPober Abstract: On broadly Copernican grounds, we are entitled to assume that apparently behaviorally sophisticated extraterrestrial 1/4
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entities (“aliens”) would be conscious. Otherwise, we humans would be inexplicably, implausibly lucky to have consciousness, while similarly behaviorally sophisticated entities elsewhere would be mere shells, devoid of consciousness. However, this Copernican default 2/5
assumption is canceled in the case of behaviorally sophisticated entities designed to mimic superficial features associated with consciousness (“consciousness mimics”), and in particular a broad class of current, near-future, and hypothetical robots. These considerations, 3/5
which we formulate, respectively, as the Copernican and Mimicry Arguments, jointly defeat an otherwise potentially attractive parity principle, according to which we should apply the same types of behavioral or cognitive tests to aliens and robots, attributing or denying 4/6
