From Quantifying Vagueness To Pan-niftyism
This work addresses the problem of quantifying vague philosophical concepts for researchers in philosophy and cognitive science, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing ideas like Integrated Information Theory.
The paper introduces a simple model for quantifying philosophical vagueness, such as consciousness and agency, and explores how this quantification can lead to pan-niftyism, revealing that frameworks like Integrated Information Theory imply panpsychism due to inherent structural biases in the metric.
In this short paper, we will introduce a simple model for quantifying philosophical vagueness. There is growing interest in this endeavor to quantify vague concepts of consciousness, agency, etc. We will then discuss some of the implications of this model including the conditions under which the quantification of `nifty' leads to pan-nifty-ism. Understanding this leads to an interesting insight - the reason a framework to quantify consciousness like Integrated Information Theory implies (forms of) panpsychism is because there is favorable structure already implicitly encoded in the construction of the quantification metric.