It’s not clear to me that categorising or treating things as conscious is innate/genetic/whatever. This seems like exactly the kind of relatively easy empirical question of human nature where anthropology can just come along and sucker-punch you with a society that has no conception of consciousness.
In general, I think this heuristic is very weak evidence; belief in the supernatural and acceptance of fake or epiphenomenal explanations are mistakes to which humans and their societies are reliably prone. (In fact, if I had to try to name things that wouldn’t get me sucker-punched by anthropology when I claimed them as universal to human cultures, then belief in the supernatural and fake explanations might be near the top of the list.)
It’s not clear to me that categorising or treating things as conscious is innate/genetic/whatever. This seems like exactly the kind of relatively easy empirical question of human nature where anthropology can just come along and sucker-punch you with a society that has no conception of consciousness.
In general, I think this heuristic is very weak evidence; belief in the supernatural and acceptance of fake or epiphenomenal explanations are mistakes to which humans and their societies are reliably prone. (In fact, if I had to try to name things that wouldn’t get me sucker-punched by anthropology when I claimed them as universal to human cultures, then belief in the supernatural and fake explanations might be near the top of the list.)