Hi Mark,

You seem to not know much about how canonizer works, what it is, or what it has already accomplished.

You indicated how “Crowd Sourcing” is not the source to “wisdom” or “understanding” and that the crowd is “clueless”.  I agree with you, that currently the crowd is quite clueless.  The only reason we want to measure this cluelessness, using the default popular consensus canonizer algorithm, is so we can compare this to the “expert consensus” as measured by expert canonizer algorithms.  What you can measure, will improve.  This allows the experts to better find out what the popular consensus is.  Knowing where the crowd is mistaken and why, they can then better form the expert consensus in a way that the crowd can better keep up.  One of many ways this canonization process amplifies the wisdom of the previously, clueless.  For example, global warming experts will finally be able to know what the crowd believes, and why.  And they will be able to measure which arguments better convince the crowd…  Again, amplifying the wisdom of the crowd.

Before Canonizer.com existed, many of the notes groups and forums  I participated in, even the philosophy ones, would try to shame people into not bringing up the topic of “qualia”, knowing that this would just lead to a shouting match, where no matter what you referenced from what was coming out of the Ivory Tower and Peer reviewed journals, someone else would throw an equally ivory towers reference claiming it was “fake news”.  The same old yelling match, and reference throwing at each other never made any progress, and ultimately one side or the other would accuse the other of being Nazis.  The stuff being published in peer reviewed journals is no different.  This fear and loathing everyone has of even bring up the topic of qualia, as a result of all this, is the biggest reason the crowd is so clueless.  Even many neural experimentalist fear bringing up the word qualia.  If they try to consult the peer review journals on this, it is all junk, so they just give up after a few years.  Jack Galant is a very good example of exactly this.

Now, when you go into forums, where people know what canonizer.com is, everything has changed dramatically.  Talking about qualia is now fun.  Anyone that brings up qualia, now, is quickly met with people pointing to links, describing the state of the art of emerging expert consensus camps held by the participants in the forums.  Instead of all the repeated old arguments, on the occasion someone does bring a new argument or scientific results to the conversation that is not yet canonized, you canonize that new argument.  You can measure the quality of such arguments and evidence by how many people they convert.  We are already seeing this.  Again, that which you measure, improves the wisdom of the crowd.  These kinds of conversations, in forums, are now very fun, and you see things start to progress at an extraordinary rate, instead of being stuck on the same old stupid arguments, over and over again.  We even had a high school student come to canonizer.com, clearly initially, quite naive about many of the good arguments and theories.  Within a few months, since he was able to ignore all the old stuff by all the old experts taught in college classes, which most experts now agree have been falsified, he was competing with PhDs that had been working and publishing in the field for years with his contributions.

There are also LOTS of people that have what they believe to be the “Solution” to the hard problem, which they can’t get published, for lots of various reasons, including the fact that many of the ideas look really crazy, and have nothing to do with the real “hard problem”.  These kinds of people flock to canonizer.com, because it is finally a place where they can, not just publish their work they can canonize it, and start finding other people that agree with them, building consensus around their best ideas, and abandoning the bad ones.

Now that canonizer has been around, and we’ve been doing the consciousness consensus project for more than 10 years we’ve made a real breakthrough.  The “Representational Qualia Theory”, which has almost unanimous expert consensus, is not only proving how much consensus is possible in this field, it is the real solution to bridging the explanatory gap, describing a real way to approach the qualitative nature of consciousness scientifically. 

The Ivory tower and peer reviewed journal industry has been struggling with this so called “hard problem’, for hundreds of years. About all they’ve given anyone, is that there is no consensus on anything.  Only the bad arguments are the ones that get so often bleated, by the polarized herding crowd.  Now, with Canonizer, no more.

You also said: “You don't get to redefine "canon."  The Church owns the word.”

Which is also incorrect.  The domain name “canonizer.com” is owned by Canonizer.com LLC, and nobody could get a copyright on a word like that.  We're using it quite successfully already.

Brent