[ExI] Scientific Consensus Continues to Extend its Lead Amongst Competing Theories of Consciousness.

[Brent Allsop]

Press Release:

Scientific Consensus Continues to Extend its Dramatic Lead Amongst 
Competing Theories of Consciousness.


We've been continuing a sometimes slow and laborious survey of the 
experts process for several years now. We've been attending conferences, 
finding and interviewing experts in this field so that we might 
'canonize' their views to measure and build as much consensus as 
possible around the best theories as part of the Consciousness Survey 
Project.  The current body of "peer reviewed" work, and other surveys, 
seems to do nothing but confirm everyone's pervasive beliefs that there 
is no expert consensus in this field whatsoever.  As seems to be common 
knowledge everyone regularly mocks the field and its complete lack of 
any significant results as mere "philosophies of men". However, the 
consensus building, amplification of the wisdom of the crowd open survey 
system at Canonizer.com, despite not yet receiving any funding -  being 
researched and developed completely by volunteer crowd sourced work,  
might be about to falsify this pervasive belief that consciousness is so 
"hard" and that it is only almost approachable via a very few super 
brains.  The dramatic early consensus emerging and extending its lead 
seems to be indicating there may already be a significant amount of 
agreement on a great many fairly simple things, in this theoretical 
field of science, after all.

The supporters of this emerging consensus camp recently unanimously 
agreed to name it "Representational Qualia Theory".  (see: 
http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/6 ).  For the last 6 months, they have 
been collaboratively developing and negotiating a new version of the 
camp statement concisely describing what most of the experts appear to 
already agree on.  It's not easy getting this much consensus from this 
many diverse experts.  Such has never been achieved in the past.  But it 
now appears possible if you have the right techniques, such as the 
ability to push lesser important disagreeable ideas out of the way, into 
sub camps, instead of exclusively focusing only on them. This new super 
camp statement, after months of negotiation, finally just recently made 
it through the unanimous canonization review process. In addition to 
answering the question of where redness is located (It is not a property 
of the strawberry, but of our knowledge of it) it includes the 
description of the *"Quale Interpretation Problem"* which is a 
mechanical description of why ineffable properties are blind to 
traditional cause and effect observation.  It also includes predictions 
of various possible ways scientists will be able to get around this 
problem to "eff" these ineffable properties. (see: 
http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/102)  Doing so, as predicted, would 
finally resolve the many long standing issues such as "the problem of 
other minds"', "what it is like to be a bat", possibly even falsifying 
"Idealism", "Solipsism", "Skepticism", for many and so on.

The highest top super camp in the main survey topic addresses whether or 
not consciousness is approachable via science. So far, about 29 of the 
35 participants are in this super camp with only a few brave souls 
willing to put their reputation on the line by standing up and 
supporting competing camps such as: "Consciousness is of Divine Origin 
and Unfathomable Apart from God".

The emerging "Representational Qualia Theory" camp is at the next level 
down, surprisingly with almost as much consensus.  When we first started 
this survey, we thought there would be many significant competitors to 
this camp such as simple "Direct Perception", "Naive Computational 
Functionalism" (very different than the qualophile Computational 
Functionalism Camp http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/9), "we don't have 
qualia, it just seems like we do", "idealism", "you can't eff the 
ineffable" and so on. At least, that is what the Wikipedia article on 
qualia and other sources (falsely?) leads one to believe.  The initial 
motivation of this project was to get a concise and quantitative handle 
on any possible competing camps.  We were also hoping for up to date, 
concise descriptions of the best theories with real time quantitative 
measures of how well accepted each was that nobody could deny, no matter 
how much they wanted to, or how much they used the noisy and popular 
publications to argue otherwise.  Despite our continued best efforts to 
recruit experts to support any such competing camps, and make the survey 
more comprehensive, it is surprising how it seems that so far nobody is 
willing to stand up and make any effort to support any of them at 
anywhere near the rate, compared to the many emerging experts which are 
already so willing to support this new "Representational Qualia Theory".

According to this emerging consensus camp there is significant consensus 
about WHERE redness and all the other phenomenal properties 
consciousness is composed of are located - the final result of the 
perception process. The only remaining yet to be falsified issue, at 
least for the experts appears to be the WHATs and HOWs of redness. At 
the sub camp levels below this consensus camp, some dramatic theories 
are forming about these WHATs and HOWs. The best of them are making 
obviously falsifiable predictions about just what science is about to 
discover and how it will validate each theory to the falsification of 
all competitors.

The clear consensus continues at the next sub level with the Mind-Brain 
Identity theory camp leading against some finally significantly 
supported competitors such as Higher-dimension Theories (including the 
Smythies-Carr Hypothosis) and Panexperientialism.

At the next level down the current consensus is far less clear and far 
more dramatic. The early and still holding on to its lead camp is the 
one led by David Chalmers, or "Functional Property Dualism". Its 
principle doctrine is Chalmers' "Invariance Principle" which holds that 
the same quale can "arise" in some "hard" way from any equivalent 
functional isomorph, from silicon to neurons, or anything that can do 
Turing computation. This theory is basically falsifiably predicting you 
will be able to reliably know when you are observing redness when you 
observe the right functionality.

But a rapidly gaining camp appears to be on the verge of overtaking this 
consensus camp at this sub level. This is the "Material Property 
Dualism" camp which basically predicts that redness is simply a property 
of some material in the brain. It predicts that without this right stuff 
which has these phenomenal properties, you won't have redness. And if 
you observe the right stuff, in the right neural correlate state, you 
will be able to reliably know, in an effing way, what the person is 
experiencing.

This emerging camp further breaks down into the newest to be canonized 
and obviously very popular sub "Orchestrated Object Reduction" camp lead 
by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. The lesser competitor is "Macro 
Property Dualism" which predicts phenomenal properties can just as 
easily be a property of any classical non quantum object, possibly some 
kind of standing wave of neural firing, even possibly a set of classical 
bouncing 'billiard balls', and that no quantum weirdness or any magic is 
required to discover or eff the ineffable. All that is required is 
proper communication, and thinking about it in the right way, to know 
what where and how to look/test for it.

Of course, we continue to seek to make the survey more comprehensive in 
this crowd sourced open survey wiki way. Whether you are an expert (see: 
http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/53/11 ) or not, we seek to measure and 
compare it all. Even high school students have been making significant 
contributions to this amplification of the wisdom of the crowd process. 
Perhaps there is a much better way to organize this camp structure? If 
so, it can all be accommodated, according to the will of the scientific 
consensus. So if you feel there is a justified theory that could turn 
out to be the one validated by science, please help us get such 
'canonized' for the benefit of everyone. There are volunteers ready to 
help integrate, or canonize your ideas into what has already been built. 
Help us sooner get to what could turn out to be the greatest scientific 
achievement of all time: The demonstrable discovery and agreement of 
what, where, and how the conscious mind is.

As always, our goal is to rigorously capture and measure, in real time, 
when the demonstrable science validates the one theory and falsifies all 
others. When this revolution does take place, we hope to be able to see 
it very definitively and undeniably, as the experts start to abandon the 
finally falsified camps. Just out of the gate, it appears that at least 
at some level, this could have already started, likely in a more 
dramatic way than when we finally all followed Galileo's lead and 
switched from a geocentric solar system view.  We hope to measure and 
speed up this process.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20111015/6676534f/attachment.html>