Without trying to understand consciousness at all, I will note a few observables about it. We seem to biologically be prone to recognize it. People seem to recognize it even in things that we would mostly agree don’t actualy have it. So we know biology / evolution selected to tend to recognize it, and we know that the selection pressure was such that the direction of error is to recognize it when it’s not there rather than to fail to recognize it when it is. That implies that failure to recognize consciousness is probably very non adaptive. Which means that it’s probably pointing to something significant.
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.)
Without trying to understand consciousness at all, I will note a few observables about it. We seem to biologically be prone to recognize it. People seem to recognize it even in things that we would mostly agree don’t actualy have it. So we know biology / evolution selected to tend to recognize it, and we know that the selection pressure was such that the direction of error is to recognize it when it’s not there rather than to fail to recognize it when it is. That implies that failure to recognize consciousness is probably very non adaptive. Which means that it’s probably pointing to something significant.
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.)