[ExI] Currently leading “qualia” camp attacking Dennett’s “mistake”.

[Brent Allsop]

Open letter to Dr.s Daniel Dennett and Keith Frankish,

There is a new emerging camp, at Canonizer.com, very supportive of 
Daniel Dennett’s ideas about consciousness currently being called 
Representational Functionalism (current camp: 
http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/18).  Despite rapid achievement of 
some significant consensus for this new camp, at that level, it still 
lags behind the leading expert consensus Property Dualism camp (current 
camp: http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/19 ).

In response to the theoretically revolutionary success of this new 
emerging camp, the experts supporting the currently leading “classic 
qualia” property dualism camp are working to canonize a new version of 
their camp statement containing a significant attack against this 
upstart.  This attack is against the ‘mistake’ most often attributed to 
Daniel Dennett, when people claim we don’t have qualia "it just seems 
like we do." [Consciousness Explained P. 375].

The experts in this upstart camp, in response to this pending attack, 
have proposed that Daniel Dennett doesn’t mean that we don't have some 
subjective experiences.  It would be tautologically false to say,  "We 
don't have the experiences that we seem to have, we just seem to have 
them."  Instead, they suggest that Dennett is saying something like "we 
don't have experiences that have any magical properties beyond the 
causal structure and dynamics of physics, it just seems like we do."

Is this response being taken by this upstart camp the best consensus 
thinking by the most experts?  How many other experts are there that 
think this is a completely inadequate response, for the reasons being 
given in the newly proposed Property Dualism statement containing this 
attack?  Is this really a mistake?  Are there any other better ways to 
think about this issue out there, and how much consensus might there be 
for such?  Both camps would like to know, what Dr. Dennett, and others 
in this camp thinks, so we can avoid this kind of speculation in any 
statements that end up making it through the canonization process.

This is an open letter in that we are seeking to survey for what 
everyone thinks on this issue.  How many people will be in the camp 
Dennett will ultimately end up in, before he ends up there, after all 
the arguments and science are said and done?

The new version of Property Dualism camp, and related sub camp 
statements, containing this attack are being collaboratively developed 
by everyone in a wiki way on Google docs, to eventually be 'canonized' 
once finalized by everyone in their respective camps. We invite any and 
everyone to help improve this process, whatever your current working 
hypothesis is regarding consciousness.  Here are the links to the 
proposed drafts of the new Goggle doc statements containing this attack:

•    Property Dualism 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gginaif0YTvDVSwFF7V_wRei-SDZlelt0LPIc5I_gD8/edit
•    Material Property Dualism 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dogSoCsouz2RhQ-CTNjtnYJ8Xr6JILNDki5Kn_met_o/edit
•    Macro Material Property Dualism 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V03WBMSY5cKf97NoM6KPZSKtxEEHg5MZJfb6FPq0Ui0/edit

As always, the goal of this open survey process is to amplify everyone's 
wisdom with significantly improved communication by collaboratively 
developing concise descriptions of the best theories of consciousness, 
building consensus around such, and rigorously tracking how much 
consensus there is for each, as we approach what could turn out to be 
the greatest and most consensus building scientific discovery of all 
time.  It appears there may already be much more consensus than anyone 
realizes.

   Brent Allsop
   Volunteer Consciousness Survey Project