Comment by ratelimitsteve

This. There are plenty of people who believe to the bottoms of their hearts that inanimate things have a consciousness. If consciousness is the belief of consciousness, then those things are conscious. But for each person who believes they are, at least one person does not believe that they are. So those things also lack belief, and are therefore not conscious. Unless the author wants to propose some idea of consciousness by plurality, where if more people think a thing thinks than don't. But that would mean that a thing's consciousness can come and go without anything about the actual thing changing at all.

Realistically this article is just trying to make it seem that believing something is the same as it being true and that's patently absurd, but it makes people feel good to think it.