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Press Release:<br>
<br>
Scientific Consensus Continues to Extend its Dramatic Lead Amongst
Competing Theories of Consciousness.<br>
<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
The supporters of this emerging consensus camp recently unanimously
agreed to name it "Representational Qualia Theory". (see:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/6">http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/6</a> ). 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 <b>"Quale Interpretation Problem"</b> 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:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/102">http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/102</a>) 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.<br>
<br>
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".<br>
<br>
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
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/9">http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/9</a>), "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".<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/53/11">http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/53/11</a> ) 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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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