Consciousness likely not unique to earthlings, paper says

https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2026/06/10/consciousness-likely-not-unique-earthlings-paper-says

by giuliomagnifico • 1 month ago

42 54 1 month ago

news.ucr.edu

flanked-evergl• 1 month ago

[flagged]

Animats2• 1 month ago

Good comment.

Life needs some kind of chemistry that doesn't lock up into compounds so stable they're hard to crack apart, but allows compounds stable enough to build structures. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are suck a system. That's why organic chemistry is a thing. There aren't that many families of elements with that property. Ammonia and silicon based life have been suggested. But none of the alternatives have very promising chemistry. See [1]. Life is probably stuck with CHON, in the "goldilocks zone" where water exists as a liquid.

We now know that planets are not rare. Many extrasolar planets have been discovered. A few are promising. The systems with known extrasolar planets might have smaller, more interesting planets, too small to be detected at interstellar ranges.

But stars are a long way away. Unless FTL is possible (which it probably isn't, because causality would break), the most we can hope for is someone to talk to by radio or something similar.

See the Drake Equation.[2] There's been progress on firming up the numbers since the 1950s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

bluGill3• 1 month ago

CHON are also very common in the universe. Most proposed alternatives (not all) depend on things less common. This doesn't rule them out but it makes the odds worse.

Radio communications between tween solar systems require more energy than we have. We couldn't detect earth level civilizations in the nearest solar system (which probably doesn't have earth like life) even if both of us by chance aimed at each other at the correct time.

RetroTechie• 1 month ago

Faster Than Light (FTL) isn't needed for interstellar travel. A cosy 0.01c would cross the distance between Sun and its closest neighbour (Proxima Centauri) in ~425 years. Less if we wait for it (or another star) to make its closest approach.

Further-away stars would take longer but on the flipside you have many more candidates as destination.

TLDR; any spaceship that can be kept operational for a few centuries or millenia, while travelling at a modest fraction of c, would allow space-faring intelligent life to meet alien life in person, as long as it is 'nearby' (compared to crossing the Milky Way for example).

Not saying that's easy! Or that alien life is nearby. But possible.

OgsyedIE• 1 month ago

Of the many different scientific traditions that have converged on different ways of treating this question, the most compelling one I've found is Prigogine's dissipative structures model, which on a detailed read seems to be the most amenable tool for some follow-up work somewhere to start quantifying such things. Worth a look in if you enjoyed the OP article.

wahern• 1 month ago

The notion that life is favored because it accelerates global evolution toward increased entropy predates, I think, Prigogine.

But it doesn't resolve the question of whether life, especially intelligent life, actually exists elsewhere. On Earth the vast majority of tornados only occur in a narrow swath of land because while they're immensely efficient at dissipating energy there are several prerequisites required for them to emerge. And there are many other simpler dissipation mechanisms that end up narrowing the odds of configurations amenable to tornado formation.

Moreover, these systems could easily overshoot and snuff themselves out; settling into a complex (as opposed to static or chaotic) configuration might be favored in some sense but still be incredibly rare to become established. The fact we see so many of them on Earth might just be a reflection of the anthropic principle. That is, there's a correlation between our existence and all the other complex systems surrounding us, biologic, geologic, etc.

The observable universe isn't infinite, and the more we learn about all the chance mechanisms that coincided to result in Earth, let alone the emergence of Earth life, the easier it is to believe that at this moment in the observable universe we might very well be alone. Maybe we aren't, but "the universe is big" simply doesn't cut it, not even when positing unimaginable biologies. It's doesn't take that many combined odds to conceivably end up with a number for the probability of life that is comparable in [inverse] magnitude to the size of our observable universe in stars, planets, or even atoms.

If we live in an infinite universe, then it's a stronger argument, though it wouldn't necessarily follow that life definitely must exist elsewhere even if beyond observability.

bluGill3• 1 month ago

The observable Universe is very small. For purposes of life living on a planet it is only our solar system. Even if we allow some planet sized life form, we don't get enough information from planets to detect that

darkhorse132• 1 month ago

Wow, a paper said this so it must be true. What is the point of research like this that can never be tested? Genuinely curious. Shouldn't we find non-Earth lifeforms FIRST before even trying to make these conclusions?

Edit: Wasn't trying to be harsh here. To be clear, I do believe in consciousness. This sounded a little clickbaity. I also think string theory is a meaningless pursuit.

zahlman• 1 month ago

This is a philosophy paper; it doesn't appear to be posturing as "research".

baxtr2• 1 month ago

Yes philosophy can say anything it wants

JumpCrisscross• 1 month ago

a paper said this so it must be true

Who, other than you, claimed this?

Coming up with a dumb thing someone else could say, but has in fact not, is not rhetoric. It’s not insightful. It’s beating a straw man like a piñata.

dist-epoch• 1 month ago

So, like string theory?

darkhorse132• 1 month ago

Exactly like string theory.

toxicunderGroov• 1 month ago

Watching tech people grabble with philosophy is hilarious.

kelseyfrog• 1 month ago

Of all the non-earthlings I've met, exactly zero are what I'd call conscious.

mellosouls• 1 month ago

“This thing that nobody knows what it is is likely shared by things nobody knows even exist.”

t234143212• 1 month ago

..dead by translation.

Solaris ? Do stars dream of being a Sun and what they can do about it ? (master SF)

- but is he talking about.. _frozen_ mass imagination (or snapshot hallucination) ??

- consciousness? - yes, lots of it is there, as of many other beings caught by _Language Models_

trick-or-treat• 1 month ago

Solaris asks way more questions than it answers. How does a planet evolve a sentient ocean? Did the ocean arrive from elsewhere to a dry planet? On what substrate would sentient oceand form and how would they reproduce?

t234143212• 1 month ago

If forms could evolve (self or own factors), multiply it by infinity to find 1 at least (as we are) ?

(aside of a a joke that the universe (with us as a part of it) is not evolving but computing a number (42 exactly) - which eventually may become real thanks LLM) [Lem:Dick .. (Adams)]

cadamsdotcom• 1 month ago

The problem with assertions like this is there’s not an attempt to prove or disprove them. Just a vague reasoning from examples.

Science works. Philosophy can help guide that by helping us decide where to look. So I guess this paper is helping in its own small way.

ktallett• 1 month ago

Philosophy is often a key stepping stone to science. Wondering what could be, is taking someone to the next step. If we ever want to do something that isn't just small increments on the past this is needed.

peter-m80• 1 month ago

Schwitzgebel and Pober do not attempt to define consciousness

Aaand I stopped reading. If you cannot describe or frame the object of your study, then I don't care.

viach• 1 month ago

When I checked the last time "consciousness" was not defined yet. So the title can be read as "Some things are likely not unique to earthlings"

phire• 1 month ago

They side-step the issue:

"Schwitzgebel and Pober do not attempt to define consciousness. Instead, they proceed from the premise that it's a real and recognizable phenomenon, posing a narrower question: Must it be tied to the biology found on Earth?"

Basically, they are asserting that no matter how we define consciousness, it can't be unique to earth's biology.

bawolff3• 1 month ago

However their argument essentially amounts to: nothing is unique to earth, therefore conciousness isn't.

This feels deeply unsatisfying to me, because the argument is not specific to conciousness so it doesn't tell us anything about conciousness.

Personally i suspect conciousness is kind of code for: the experience of being alive as a human. In which case aliens might not be concious by definition.

keiferski• 1 month ago

I am thinking more and more that it’s fundamentally a Wittgensteinian kind of problem.

We define a word to mean a certain collection of things (consciousness) and then try and stretch that definition to other things in the world that have the same appearance.

The problem is that this abstract term likely doesn’t exist in itself as a quality, but is just a shorthand for a collection of behaviors that are observed only in biological entities.

And so even if a machine exhibits all the appearance qualities of this definition of consciousness, it’s fundamentally not the same thing at all, and the only reason we think it is, is because our language is insufficient for actually describing reality.

In pragmatic terms it might not actually matter, if a machine 100 years from now passes every conceivable Turing Test. But that doesn’t mean that machines have become conscious in the way humans are conscious.

Expanding in an edit: It just means that the word consciousness is more descriptive, like awareness, and not the soul-derived concept that it still functions as today. Side note – I spent a couple months last year researching the history of consciousness for an essay contest, and one conclusion is how consciousness is descended in large part from our concepts of the soul. Which explains a lot of the reason it has such cultural prestige today.

fellowniusmonk• 1 month ago

Consciousness is a fuzzy word and I would call it a joke if it wasn't actually dangerous currently.

And currently its widespread usage in how people relate to and talk about Ai is actively harmful.

And dont get me started on how terrible the "hard problem" is, yeesh.

max_entropy• 1 month ago

Go on, tell us about the hard problem.

zkmon2• 1 month ago

Probably they should start by NOT treating the consciousness as a non-physical special thing. Maybe it's not a thing to search for at all. At what point did it become a thing? Separate from chemical and physical interactions between elements?

When you redefine consciousness as just any other chemical, electrical or physical thing, suddenly it's everywhere. You don't need to search for it. The river which finds its way to ocean, has it. The earthquake which decides when to erupt has it. The electrons which decide to jump across orbitals have it.

The confusion is around cause and effect. The standard notion is that a conscious agent can initiate an effect without a cause. A boulder doesn't roll over and hit another unless someone moved it in the first place. It doesn't decide to move and hit another. However this distinction barely survives on the temporal sequencing of cause and effect. That temporal sequence is only valid in a very narrow context and range.

We should stop seeing consciousness as a thing.

cyclopeanutopia2• 1 month ago

At what point did it become a thing?

Early on and for obvious reasons - it is pretty easy to observe in oneself, much easier than discovering electrons. ;)

bawolff3• 1 month ago

But its also pretty hard to observe in others, which makes it hard to come up with a satisfying definition. Without a concrete definition, you can't really do science with it.

notarobot123• 1 month ago

However consciousness is defined its evidently an emergent phenomenon. Emergent properties are real even if they are not a "thing" in themselves. Being rooted in a material reality doesn't prevent emergence of something else/additional that has qualities not easily understood by just understanding the individual mechanisms that give rise to it.

pyeri• 1 month ago

It became a thing due to the experience of self-reflection. The million dollar question is how come humans (and few other organisms) are able to self reflect on their biology, life situations, logic, math and even consciousness itself? However complex and sophisticated a machine's brain is, be it biological or mechanical (AI/AGI), no known laws of science allows it to self-reflect. This is famously called "the hard problem of consciousness" in philosophy which remains unresolved to this day.

visarga• 1 month ago

It doesn't reflect itself, we only see the UI of a complex process, not the real thing. We don't understand what happened in our brains any better for being able to feel conscious. We can only be conscious of what is cost effective and cost necessary to feel, in order to persist and survive. Animals for example and primitive humans could reproduce without understanding reproduction mechanisms, just the operational side.

zkmon2• 1 month ago

Self-reflecting may not be the distinct enough feature. Any physical/chemical/electrical reaction can be termed as self-reflecting, as it reflects on what just happened and then responds with an effect. AI is already able to reflect on it's outputs and refine them, and distinguish between the user and it's own identity. Living things have evolved senses and long-term memory to help them with faster macro-responses beyond the usual physical reactions.

When a ball hits a bat, the ball also has a short-term memory and sense in the forms of how the inter-molecular forces detect and respond to the event of getting too close to the molecules of the bat and react with a repelling force. A more evolved form would be your consciousness.

Further, a lot of living things on earth might not have self-awareness.

Tadpole9181• 1 month ago

However complex and sophisticated a machine's brain is, be it biological or mechanical (AI/AGI), no known laws of science allows it to self-reflect.

...What? If a human brain can, that's quite literally proof a machine can? We are made out of matter that obeys the laws of physics.

And we have never made a machine remotely complicated enough to mimick a human brain. LLMs are the closest we've ever come, and they're not even close. Nor are the even made in a way condusive to doing so (focused on generating requested output, not postulating randomly). So as to the mechanical machine specifically, nothing exists to even be capable of being observed to make such a claim!

teekert• 1 month ago

Agreed, what’s much more interesting is to focus on being able to model the world around you, play out scenarios in that model and make better predictions, and consequently, decisions because of that ability. (Of course “better” is still a term up for scrutiny.)

I feel that this is what we will ultimately conclude is the thing that makes us feel “conscious”. We model the world, but with ourselves in it. We need some sense of self to do this. Doesn’t mean this can’t be done in (probably) a million different ways.

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of information.

soundworlds• 1 month ago

I do think the last 100 years' assumption of "it's physical material or it doesn't exist" should not be so easily accepted as fact.

It's like saying love, or nation states, or music doesn't exist. These things exist as much as it can matter to human experience, but you can't explain them by materiality alone.

beshrkayali2• 1 month ago

It can’t, unless you descend into sophistry. We came up with and defined the word “consciousness” specifically to fit our own understanding of the collection of behaviors we do that seem to apply only to us. What it means is based on what _we humans_ do, not something observed objectively, so it’s more like a human trait than a thing by itself that we fit into.

lxgr• 1 month ago

Please do share your clear and uncontroversial definition of consciousness, that sounds very useful!

beshrkayali2• 1 month ago

Should’ve probably said “attempted at defining” instead of “defined”.

kbrkbr2• 1 month ago

Probably best to read the paper. I personally don't find it very convincing, because of the many speculative premises. But that is not a refutation.

Here it is:

https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/SubstrateFle...

bawolff3• 1 month ago

Reading the paper, this seems kind of silly.

The argument essentially is. The universe is really big. It would be weird if we were the only thing alive in it, so probably there are other life forms out there. Given enough of them probably some are conscious and made out of different stuff then we are.

And sure, fair enough. That seems plausible. But it also seems like not a very interesting argument. It is essentially just saying the universe is big, therefore all the possibilities are out there.

albert_e• 1 month ago

Do humans themselves have varying degrees of consciousness? How would we know / measure.

How does a level of consciousness that goes well above human baseline look like / work like / feel like?

Could such consciousness go to levels not merely slightly above human levels -- but like 10x or 100x (if there were a way to quantify).

What would that unlock?

Curious to know if there has been any vivid description of these possibilities by people much smarter than me ... that might help me appreciate the shape of such things :)

GistNoesis• 1 month ago

Sure there are varying degrees of consciousness. Everyone during its life starts from zero consciousness as a baby, then it develops as life flourish, then fades away in old age.

You can take various brain scans, MRI, EEG. Then you data-analyze them to compare to other scans, and you map things out.

In chess there is this ELO rating which allow to compare various players. This concept can also be applied to comparing various AI, and even though progress happens in various different dimensions (coding, mathematics, question answering, style, cohesiveness,...), there are a bunch of step changes where once you cross the threshold progress in various domains rise simultaneously until they plateaued again.

In the multidimensional energy landscape of self-organization, when you try to minimize the energy, like a sequence of waterfall cascade, you go down by steps and there are can be big falls or small falls and you don't really know until you take the step.

One such step is the ability to self-organize the hardware your consciousness runs on. For example if you are a human it may involve optimizing the neuro-chemistry of the brain by taking various substances, or by controlling the body finely enough that it produce them itself. For a machine that could be designing is own chips or nano-machines.

But it can also be expanding the consciousness on the software side, by having a rich inner life, where you have various memories. You structure your brain "database" more efficiently so that it can make use of the progress of information retrieval technologies. For example you can incorporate mental calculation algorithms, so that it becomes second nature. You can visualize, grow your imagination, have ideas interact with each others.

There is no longer a single thread of consciousness. Ideas comes in your head faster than you can process them, they just are. They progress you don't know where they are going, but you just go with the flow, trusting everything will sort itself correctly. Then you notice you are not limited by your own brain, but you can sync up with other beings. So you start vibrating with others expanding your consciousness to something greater than yourself.

Then you are vibing with the world, vibing with the universe, you understand its rules, and you realize time is not linear; in an instant more can happen than in a lifetime. It's all computations, and by organizing your own brain in a certain configuration you can force the universe to spend all its computational budget on the intricacies of your thoughts. You set-up new rules for an interesting universe, one more beautiful, number 43 among the promising ones, more worthy of exploring than the one you've already connected to, and you let them fly ; you have become the universe.

aetherspawn• 1 month ago

Despite the general consensus, I disagree with the idea that you can explain consciousness in an entirely physical way.

That’s because consciousness allows an object to experience its wholeness, but there is no physical explanation as to what makes an object ‘whole’, for example smooshing two brains together doesn’t result in a single consciousness any more than cutting a brain in half results in two. Yet, the same action by another mechanism (reproduction) does create a new consciousness.

kbrkbr2• 1 month ago

I don't think there is a general consensus. In the 2020 Philpaper Survey roughly half of surveyed philosophers lean towards physicalism, roughly a third to non-physicalism, and the rest to something else.

https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all

typerandom• 1 month ago

My perspective on consciousness is not as a single function unique to humans, but as a process of learning that emerges from coherent interaction at all scales of observers. I think the reason humans have developed the kind of consciousness we generally observe is due to our slow development combined with the physical architecture to support the processing and growth. While many animals learn to master their mechanics and survival early, humans are slow and take time to develop. I often hear people argue that humans are incredible at learning, but I’d argue it being the opposite. We are terrible at learning, and it is what enables us to have the time to observe and learn from coherent information at scales inaccessible to other observers.

Consciousness likely not unique to earthlings, paper says

Related Stories