[Wikipedia-l] A new source? (was Re: Are we running out of sources?)

[Brent Allsop]

Hi David,

Thanks for your responses, and for following this discussion.

We have recently just past 20,000 publications describing a diverse set 
of theories about consciousness as documented in David Chalmers 
bibliography:

http://consc.net/mindpapers

Wouldn't it be valuable to have all the similar theories being argued 
for by everyone combined into one unified, concise survey, 
quantitatively measuring which were the most well accepted by the 
experts, and also how this is changing as ever more scientific data 
comes in?  Something which non experts, such as yourself and myself (I 
don't have a PhD), could approach and understand without having to read 
20,000 publications?

Some of us see the possibility that there may be a revolution taking 
place in the study of the mind as we speak.  But, this is just a hunch, 
a theory, and we have no rigorous hard survey data to back this up so we 
can make such a claim.  Hence, we're working on creating tools to do 
just this - rigorously measure just what the experts are now starting to 
accept as true.  The results are still early, and the survey is far from 
comprehensive, but there are already some exciting results.  The 
representational and real theory, as described in this camp:

http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/6

predicts that we are about to achieve the ability to 'eff' the ineffable 
which will demonstrably / scientifically prove the theories described 
there in to be true.  And they are predicting that this, the discovery 
of the whats hows and wheres of the subjective mind, will be the 
greatest scientific discovery of all time.

You are right, we could be all wrong.  But that is not the purpose of 
canonizer.com - to say who is wrong and who is right.  The purpose of 
canonizer.com is to make it possible for the ones that know what is 
right and what is wrong, to better understand what everyone that is 
wrong believes, so they can better understand the mistakes everyone is 
making and to better  help them to see why they are wrong, and what is 
really right.  The experts in that camp are predicting that this effing 
demonstrable scientific proof will falsify all other theories of 
consciousness, and soon convince everyone to accept these theories as 
correct.  Is there any better way to know who was all wrong, and when 
they all discovered such and why, than to rigorously survey for and 
measure such?  Everyone being wrong certainly makes it hard for us to 
make any progress.  We can't find something, if everyone is looking for 
it in the wrong place, or even worse, not looking for it at all.  As 
this camp is starting to show, more and more leading experts believe 
this is exactly what is happening.

Brent Allsop



David Goodman wrote:
> Dear Brent,
>
> There are too many things here to respond to at once.  And that's the
> problem: people have a limited channel capacity. It can be high, but
> it remains limited. I can carry on 5 discussions of this sort, but not
> 50. Some few people can do 50, but  even they can't do 500. All group
> processes work only as long as the number of people involve remains
> limited enough to permit individual pairwise discussion.  It can
> extend to large numbers of people--but only if they remain observers.
> Plato shows Socrates talking to 1 or 2 people at a time, while a dozen
> stand around and watch--and Plato when he wrote it down (or composed
> it from scratch, as the case may be) knew that hundreds of others
> would read. It has scaled up to millions very easily: most observing,
> some starting separate dialogs of their own.
>
> I don't think any fundamental revolution is taking place. I think what
> we are see is just the opening and expansion of the previous world of
> literate communities. You will probably answer that changing the scale
> to this extent is revolutionary, but I think it just implies a
> necessary separation into working units of a manageable size.
>
> You have a major advantage over me in this discussion: I am not an
> academic expert in this, just someone looking for good ideas, and
> finding out how good they are by questioning them.   But I have some
> minor advantages, too: librarianship is an empirical profession. We
> will do whatever works, and we are accustomed to deal with a range of
> subjects  too wide for us to fully understand.
>
> I'm not particularly interested in the theory of consciousness, so
> it's not the best example for me. I'm not particularly interested in
> any psychological theories. I'm a biologist & a reductionist one at
> that. To the extent that experiment & predicted observation supports a
> theory, it can be used as correct.  Consensus has nothing to do with
> it, nor do surveys of opinion. We can all be wrong.
>
> What we need consensus for is going about those practical things of
> life in which we must cooperate and live together. To remain a group,
> we have to agree enough to remain in it. And we higher primates have
> evolved so that our major activity is living in groups and watching
> each other and trying to be more clever than the rest.
>
> There's one very good thing in canonizer, that shows you realize the
> same constraints as I do: its divided structure.  But while you seem
> to think of it as  atomizing the subjects to discuss, I see it as
> partitioning the participants.
>
>
> David,
>
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>
>
>
>