Think of the (Alien) Children!
If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren [in China]. Adam Smith
Among all the articles on UFOs I’ver read over the last half year, about half of them mentioned the possibility that some UFOs are aliens. But I can’t recall any giving thought to how such aliens might feel about the issue. Isn’t that awful self-centered of us?
You may say that you can’t be bothered to empathize with only hypothetical creatures, and we just aren’t at all sure that UFO aliens exist. Fair enough. But then I will point you to grabby aliens; in my opinion we have strong enough evidence of their existence to say they are more likely to exist than not. If you recall, we need to explain why humans have arrived so early in the history of the universe, and a deadline set by grabby aliens who will soon fill up the universe seems our most robust explanation.
You may say that you can’t just take my word for this, that you must wait to see this argument endorse by standard academic astrophysics authorities. That, you say, is how “science” works. Fair enough. I hereby announce that our grabby aliens paper has been accepted for publication in one of the top astrophysics journals, aptly named Astrophysical Journal. (Here is a press release.) So now its not just speculation.
You may say that you still need to be sure they exist to care, and our results can’t support that level of certainty. But on the subject of global warming people often lament its effect on distant future generations, even though we can’t be sure that such future generations will exist. So you don’t need to be that sure, right?
You may argue that you’ll need to know more about these aliens before you can care about them. Fair enough. So let me tell you many things about them. They once were animals with minds and bodies like yours, but have since reimplemented themselves as artificial life. And they have been artificial life for millions of years; their tech is vastly more advanced than yours.
Even so, they are still more like you than all the other kinds of animals on Earth, as they should have trade, language, law, war, hierarchy, governance, tech, and much more. The first ones we meet will be frontier aliens, descendants of a long line who prioritized staying at the leading edge of expansion. At the expense of other things, such as world government.
There, now do you know enough to care? Does it help to know that there are vastly more of them out there are humans on Earth?
The "principle" is that consciousness plays a role in determining behavioral choices. It is not the case that it does "not further participate in causing any other event at all". That is incorrect. Consciousness does cause other events. But that doesn't mean it is somehow outside of physics. It's just at a different level of description, much like how you can talk about hurricanes without getting outside gas molecules and fluid flow. They are higher level, abstract patterns running on the substrate of the underlying implementation.
Consciousness is an algorithm, and that algorithm adds value to the animal that has it. You cannot get as successful behavior without it. That's why it evolves naturally.
(You might want to look up Compatibilism. Deterministics chess-playing programs have "free will" also.)
re epiphenomenalism, I agree with you. I’m not convinced that it is even a physically coherent concept. How could a physical event or process be caused but not further participate in causing any other event at all? It would seem to fly in the face of numerous conservation principles of physics.
I’m not clear on what principle we could expect all naturally evolved intelligent systems to necessarily feature consciousness. On the other hand who knows what features might exist in alien intelligences, as inconceivable to us as our subjectivity might be to them.