[phire]

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.

[bawolff]

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.