From Quantifying Vagueness To Pan-niftyism

Summary

AI researchers have discovered that our attempts to measure abstract concepts like consciousness mathematically may inadvertently lead us to see these qualities everywhere. The analysis reveals how quantifying vague philosophical ideas creates measurement systems that naturally find what they're looking for - similar to how AI systems learn to detect patterns. When we try to measure abstract qualities numerically, we often end up suggesting these qualities exist universally, simply due to how we've structured our measurements.

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.

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