From Quantifying Vagueness To Pan-niftyism
arXiv Preprint Archive March 1, 2021 preprint
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Topics | Philosophy of mind |
| Keywords | Cs.ai Measurement theory Pattern recognition |
| Key points | Argues that the implication of panpsychism in frameworks like Integrated Information Theory arises from implicit structure in the quantification metric rather than from the nature of consciousness itself. |
Abstract
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.