From Quantifying Vagueness To Pan-niftyism

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple model for quantifying philosophical vagueness, explores its implications for concepts like consciousness and agency, and reveals how certain frameworks inherently imply panpsychism due to their structural properties.

Contribution

It presents a novel, straightforward model for measuring vagueness in philosophical concepts and analyzes its implications for theories like Integrated Information Theory and panpsychism.

Findings

Quantification of vagueness can lead to pan-nifty-ism.

Frameworks like Integrated Information Theory imply panpsychism.

Structural properties of quantification metrics encode panpsychist implications.

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.