The Inimitable Tiff

Arico, Fiala, Goldberg & Nichols now have a new paper challenging this emerging view. They suggest that people do not in fact have special criteria for phenomenal consciousness in particular. Instead, people simply have general criteria for attributing AGENCY. Then, once people have determined that an entity counts as an AGENT, they immediately attribute to it all of the various sorts of mental states they might attribute to a human being.

Experimental philosophy’s—sorry, “X-Phi“‘s—earnestness makes me giggle. To me it reads like scientists who want to add OMG-style nerdiness to their write-ups, but can’t afford to scare crusty philosophers.