[ExI] How to Bridging the Divide and communicate?

[Brent Allsop]

Extropians,

As I love pointing out, there is a huge gulf within humanity, with 
hateful, militaristic atheists on one side, and spiritualists, or 
qualophiles, on the other.  Everyone desperately doing all they can to 
censor and destroy anyone appearing to be even close to the other side.  
And, as usual, the truth, often somewhere in the middle, is always a 
casualty of this blinding war.  Facing this headwind seems to be a big 
part of why Canonizer.com is not more popular yet.

Some of you may know, James and I submitted our "Amplifying the Wisdom 
of the Crowd" paper to the International Conference on Social 
Intelligence.  As luck would have it, at least one of our reviewers 
appeared to me to be one of these censoring extremists.  But I'll 
include part of his 'review', so you can decide for yourself:

"The philosophy in the paper is unclear, there are no scientific results 
and the contents of the test web site mentioned in the paper not really 
interesting. As a case study, this example web site fails to demonstrate 
the potential of the system developed. The web site is currently full of 
'crackpot science'."

Evidently, the surprising to everyone scientific consensus survey 
results now from including experts from Dennett, to Chalmers, to Lehar, 
and a growing number of others supporting "Representational Qualia 
Theory", doesn't count, and isn't interesting, because the results are 
nothing but 'crackpot science'.  This reviewer gave us the most negative 
possible score, with the highest possible self surety rating, that this 
shouldn't be accepted.  I'm sure anyone mentions this kind of "crackpot 
science" in any hard neural science conference, similarly is likely 
censored.  Does anyone have any other similar first hand stories of 
feeling like you've been censored in this way?  It's amazing how fast 
you get the very real 'cold shoulder' in such 'hard science' 
conferences, once you even mention 'qualia'.

Anyway, in an effort to find some way to bridge the gap on both sides of 
this immoral war, blinding everyone to what should be obvious, I'm 
thinking of adding something like the below to the front page of 
canonizer.com, and wanted to get any and all thoughts.  Could something 
like this help?

Upwards,

Brent Allsop



Note to Qualophobes, or anyone that hates or wants to censor qualia 
theories or classify all the emerging consensus theories below as 
'crackpot science':

The people developing this system are doing so because they aren't 
haters, don't want to sensor anything.  But, instead want to know what 
everyone thinks, concisely and quantitatively.  Only by knowing what 
others think, in their terminology, can we help, only with that, do we 
have a hope of communicating, and we'll likely help ourselves as much as 
anyone, by knowing and valuing, what you and everyone think, and why.

To date, a growing number of leaders in this field have already 
contributed to this survey, in various degrees, now including <a href=" 
http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/81/4">Steven Lehar</a>, <a 
href="http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/81/21">Daniel Dennett</a>, <a 
href="http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/81/2">David Chalmers</a>, <a 
href="http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/81/22">Stuart Hameroff</a>, <a 
href="http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/81/17">John Smythies</a>....  
Despite the diversity of all participants, surprising to most, there 
seems to be a significant amount of consensus emerging, on a great many 
things, as can now be indisputably seen below.  Whatever you think about 
consciousness, it would really help everyone if you could get it 
included in this survey, so we can see, concisely and quantitatively, if 
your theory can maintain anywhere near as much consensus as these 
emerging theories are achieving.

Oh, and also note, that most of the leading consensus theories are 
making falsifiable predictions about just what where and how to effigy 
discover and objectively share what is important to consciousness.  The 
focus at Canonizer.com, is what would it take for the supporters of a 
camp to consider their camp falsified?  The prediction is that it is 
only a matter of time before science demonstrates such to everyone, 
forcing all experts into the same camp.  That's the good thing about 
good theoretical science.  If you think these theories are 'crackpot 
science', it'd sure help everyone to see any better theoretical theories 
you may propose as less naive or less crackpot, and to see if they can 
match the amount of consensus the best theories are achieving.  Knowing 
how many people agree with you might hint at just how naive your own 
theories might or might not be?