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