Hi Cole and Jeffrey,

On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 1:07 PM Cole Butler <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

One day I attended a colloquium held by the philosophy professor that taught my Philosophy and the Physics course. His talk referenced the measurement problem, and it was addressed to the physics department. However, rather than sparking a discussion on what the theoretical issues with understanding quantum mechanics, the physics professors quickly made it into an egotistical thing. They turned the Q and A into a discussion about their own research, but weren’t particularly interested in discussing the fact that no current theory provides a complete answer to how a measurement is made (when the wave function collapses).

Not sure if this is what your trying to get at, but this seems to be the exact problem I see in studies of the qualitative nature of consciousness. Today, everyone simply fails to distinguish between intrinsic qualities of (reality and knowledge of reality). This results in 'qualia blindness' (using one word for all things red (both reality and knowledge of reality having the same label: red). Everyone ideologically polarizes to one hierarchy or the other, religious people claiming qualia are "spiritual qualities" and atheists claiming: "We don't have qualia , it just seems like we do". So everyone just wants to twist everything to support the ideological beliefs of their hierarchy, rather than just resolve the problem, which is usually somewhere in the middle. And people like David Chalmers becomes famous (at least to all the religious people, the enemy of the atheists) for just claiming we need to "face up to the hard problem" instead of realizing a simple mistake on our epistemology of color.

If you simply stop being qualia blind and start using multiple words for different qualities (red = reflects or emits red light, and redness = intrinsic redness quality of our knowledge of red things we directly experience). You can finally come to the simple conclusion that it isn't an impossibly "hard mind body problem" it's just a color problem. All we haver are abstract descriptions of the stuff in the brain, but we don't know the intrinsic quality any of the descriptions of behavior are describing. To know what the word "red" means, you need to point to a particular thing with that intrinsic red property. So, all we need to do is have a dictionary that might be something like: Our description of how glutamate reacts in a synapse, is describing redness. In other words, the abstract word redness and the abstract word glutamate could be labels for the same thing.

But of course, since both the religious people and atheists, have a hard time wanting to be told their entire carreras (both past and future) are based on a simple epistemology of color fallacy. nobody wants to listen to, lat alone publishing anything pointing out anything like this.

Here is a link to a new page with a set of 12 questions asking: "Are you qualia blind?" which will hopefully help people to better understand what qualia blindness is.

And as usual, you can always check out the emerging consensus "Representational Qualia Theory".

Would love feedback on any of this.

On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 7:08 PM Jeffery Smith MD <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hello, Cole and group, I definitely resonate with your thoughts. I am somewhat of an outsider, since I am primarily a clinician and do not have an academic job. From my point of view, the need for consensus is huge, as a means of strengthening the stature of psychotherapy and crossing boundaries between schools to do research. From my point of view, there are enough non-controversial principles to flesh out the common infrastructure that applies to all psychotherapies. I'm envisioning a kind of Rosetta Stone, a common set of constructs that underlie all therapies. But the amount of resistance has surprised me.

Feeling resistance has led me to think more about what keeps the current state of affairs as is. To use Dan Siegel's favorite concept from systems theory, I think there's an attractor in there somewhere.

To me these ideological "attractor"s are all based on the fact that we've all been bread to support the guy at the top of the hierarchy. For billions of years, the largest group was the only one that could survive, with siver limits on resources. And in the past, the only way to scale, was within a Hierarchy, all about only what the guy at the top wanted. These hierarchies have been bread, in a survival of the fittest contest, only the fittest surviving. The humans that were best bread to best support only the guy at the top, having a clear distinction of what is supporting our leader and right, and who wasn't supporting our leader / not right. We are good and anything not supporting our leader is "them" and needs to be either destroyed or consumed/converted. Our only surviving ancestors were the ones with the strongest tendencies to support the guy at the top, all others being slaughtered and not surviving.

As you pointed out, it is all about consensus. Building and tracking consensus is what canonizer is all about. It's all about having the fewest possible camps, with a negotiated consistent language and so on. Each camp is encouraged to describe how their camp can be falsified. Describing the experiments is the job of the theoretician, after all. Then it is up to the experimentalist to falsify all but THE ONE camp that can't be falsified - achieving a true bottom up consensus, not just what some guy at the top dictates - everything else being destroyed / consumed / ignored - at any cost.

We've already had at least one person abandon his camp on consciousness, due to falsifying evidence from the large hadron collider. And it's already surprising that even Dennett's current "Predictive Bayesian Coding Theory" is in a supporting sub camp position to RQT. I think this is strong evidence that we have already made, and continue to make more progress towards consensus than anyone realises, in this field. And I bet the same is true in most all fields. as you say. What we agree on is always far more than what we argue about and polarize on. It's all about building and tracking consensus. That which you measure, improves.

Brent Allsop