Folks,

The new and improved version of the agreement statement has been submitted, and will go live (if no objections) this Sunday.

Next, also due to Robin Faichney's suggestion, I'd like to move down a level from the agreement statement and improve things at a lower level. This is the level where the "depends on brain" camp exists.

I believe we would all be in agreement that beliefs about what we are can be split into two obvious general super "camps". One is the idea that there is some kind of soul or spirit or essence that arises from the body when it dies in some kind of supernatural or reincarnated way. The rest of us believe consciousness is dependent on or a property of the physical brain, and dies with it. I think it would be good to show this dichotomy in the POV structure, and this was the goal of the "Depends on Brain" camp statement.

Jo, your "Misinterpretation" camp here:

http://test.canonizer.com/topic.asp/23/11

is not currently under this "depends on brain" camp structure. Jo, you believe that consciousness is not something supernatural, or whatever right? If so would you object to moving your camp underneath this "depends on brain" major camp to show that you support this belief, instead of being positioned as a competitor sibling to it in the structure like it is now, implying you do not believe it?

Robin is also working on a camp statement to concisely state what he and others believe. He has indicated his beliefs are similar to Jo's. The only remaining issue for Robin's camp is where to put their "camp" statement in the existing structure.

He has also stated to me: "I don't want to support Depends on the brain, because I think it should be expressed differently. Perhaps "is not supernatural" would be better."

Surely, Robin, and most of us, are in the same camp at this level? So how is the best way to concisely describe what we believe at this level to distinguish ourselves from these "mystics"? The current version of this depends on brain statement is here:

http://test.canonizer.com/topic.asp/23/6

and I have a hard time understanding what Robin's issues are, or how it could be improved so that we are all in agreement with what it says. So, my question to Robin and all of you is, how would you describe what you believe at this level? How can we differentiate what we all believe from the "mystics" or whatever best describes them.

And how would this differ from what is there now?

Thanks

Brent Allsop

Brent, I am not happy with the change for the following reasons. 1. It only states that we do not agree with another POV, and is therefore non-informative. 2. All mystic/religious POV's are typically Descartes Dualism. This philosophical position is hardly taken serious anymore, so I think it is much too much honour for it to split the root of the topic in a "Descartes Dualism" and a "Non-Descartes Dualism" camp. 3. A better way would be to have the root split in all major current philosophical positions, such as functionalism, property dualism, physicalism/materialism (several types), and monism. Each position should have a short statement what it is about, with reference to relevant literature. This helps new contributors to find their way. Without this structure the topic will rapidly result in an unorganised jungle of opinions. I am a bit busy now, but the second half of this month I hope to be able to work on this. Best Regards, Michael Klein Breteler.

Michael,

Thanks so much for all this. I think It would be great to have a structure like this added. I wish I knew more about some of this, and am looking forward to having more of this kind of concise information added when you get the time.

I have a few questions for everyone about these categorizations and how everyone's camps might fit into such. Does everyone agree with these classifications being proposed by Michael? These are the 4 general camps that you are proposing right?

• Functionalism
• Property Dualism
• Physicalism / Materialism (several types)
• Monism

I would think that my Phenomenal Properties camp, and I believe the Functional Equivalence camp espousing Chalmers invariance principle would both be in this camp. Is that right Richwil? Stathis, and richwil, what camp would your "Turing consciousness" be in? If it also belongs in this same super camp, namely property dualism, then it would be easy to simply move the entire "Consciousness is Real" camp structure under a new Property dualism camp, or maybe we could even rename this, and add the property dualism information to it if it is likely that there would not be other structure outside of the stuff currently in the "Consciousness is Real" camp in this new general Property Dualism camp.?

If this 3rd camp doesn't go under property dualism, then we would just duplicate some of this structure in whatever additional camp it ended up in.

Michael, you also said

"All mystic/religious POV's are typically Descartes Dualism. This philosophical position is hardly taken serious anymore, so I think it is much too much honour for it to split the root of the topic in a "Descartes Dualism" and a "Non-Descartes Dualism" camp."

I would agree with this, as far as rational people not taking this stuff serious anymore, but by far the vast majority of religious / mystic people in the world still are in this camp right? I think a goal should be to also provide a place for and attempt to suck all these types of people in also. Of course, once we start to complete the reputation / canonization system, and start to develop reasonable canonizers that only recognize the support of people with clearly rational reputations; we can filter all this mystic stuff out when we want to right?

And once we start to achieve this, I bet everyone encouraging people to add their mystic POV like this (rather than just excommunicating them and refusing to tolerate them this way) will force them to think about this more and to realize there will be no such rational Canonizers that get what they believe to be "Canon" in any way. And I bet such could have a profound conversion effect on many of these people that have always been excommunicated from this community, causing them to simply never really think about just how mistaken and absurd their beliefs are?

Also, fixall, you are in the conduit / Prior to brain camp right? This would not belong in the "Depends on brain", or whatever we end up calling it, camp right? I hope the stuff I said above is not offensive to you? I don't mean it to be. I respect all Points of view, and think the more diverse the POV the better.

So, it is my POV, that we should also include this level, above the one we are talking about, and try to get all these types to participate as much as possible with us?

Brent Allsop

I would persoanlly caution against structuring material according to categories like dualism, physicalism, functionalism, because these mean quite different things to different people. (More or less by definition functionalism means something different to a physicalist and to a dualist, whatever those might mean to the reader!) In other words this sort of philosophers' categorisation crashes by its very nature. As an example of the problem: Descartes is called a dualist. Yet his objective was to unify everything under natural philosophy so he probably thought he was a monist. The duality of res extensa and res cogitans is remarkably similar in certain respects to the duality of the Fermi and Bose statistics which underlie the two sorts of particle in modern physics. In a sense, fermions take up space but bosons do not. Fermions have mass and bosons generally do not. Being conscious is not associated with an increase in mass so is likely to relate to bosons (ie res cogitans), if it relates to anything physical. Yet at another level bosons are responsible for fermions aggregating into extended objects. So Descartes was partly right in saying that physics is dual. Moreover, functionalism has to be right at the finest grain but is wrong at the wrong grain level, so its meaning is critically dependent on grain. I am afraid to say that if the project is based on these outdated and muddled philosophical concepts it will be stillborn. The original explicit categories must be kept to if all is not to fall to dust. Best wishes.

Michael is right in that the literature does distinguish between (at least) the four categories listed. However, I also agree that such categories can be confusing, and if I think about it I can convince myself that I am a property dualist, functionalist, physicalist and monist all at once! In general, there seems to be a tension between the philosophers on the one hand who concern themselves with these questions, and the scientists on the other hand who concern themselves with how the brain works and how to build a brain analogue that functions like a brain and has similar experiences to a brain. The philosophy must inform the science, since for example you have to have some justification for the belief that a computer could be conscious before you embark on building a conscious computer. However, some of the finer philosophical distinctions such as the famous "hard problem", while they may be interesting, do not seem to add anything to the science.

Thanks for communicating your thoughts! This is how we get things done, and make room for all points of view, and the more diverse the POV the better.

For me, the primary way the Canonizer is intended to work, is to simply have a set of individual concise statements that specify each theory or camp. Then to enumerate which people favor a particular theory or are in a particular camp.

Of course, there are going to be diverse sets of attributes shared amongst all the camps in diverse many to many ways. For now, we can't hope to ideally capture all such relationships in formal shared ways, but we can move in such directions by describing such relations and shared beliefs in informal ways in various individual camp statements.

The hierarchy of POV structures is just a secondary formal way to try to capture, if such makes sense, some major attributes that happen to be obviously shared by 2 or more camps. If there is a large well established structure, and a person comes up with a new theory that takes portions of many existing camps at various locations in the structure, then they will just add their "camp" statement at the top level, all on its own. If such a theory is good, many more people will join and convert, and a new structure could possibly form around it, or it could merge with other new structures, if such happens to make sense.

I agree that some of Michael's major camps could turn out to be not relevant to what anyone believes today. Michael seemed concerned that we have to get the right structure started before it gets too late, but I don't think this is necessary. We don't want to create "camps" or levels of structure that nobody is in. I think the best course of action, is to simply have the first person say what they believe at the top level, and get lots of people to do the same for different camps, then if any obvious structure shows up in sets of camps, and if everyone in those camps unanimously agrees with such, then parts of camps can merge in structural ways and so on.

This is more or less what we are doing with Jo's Misinterpretation camp. He just submitted it at the top level to get started, and we discovered that it is in agreement with the "depends on brain" camp so it is about to be merged into that structure (This merge has been proposed and will go live next Tuesday.)

Everyone is familiar with the many ways people use different names, words and levels of meaning. In the history of literature you can see the meanings, names, and usages of words change. Also there are various isolated "schools of thought" that use terminology in different and often conflicting ways to other schools. The lack of a rigorous and formal way to handle all this is what creates the mess that makes so many fields so unapproachable by so many. Look how hard and painful it was just to reclassify Pluto.

The Goal of the canonizer is to bring all this together under one unified roof, and provide more of a formal "canonization" or quantitative weighted polling system to help manage all this in a more rapid, well defined and easy way. As two different "schools of thought" come together in a single topic in the Canonizer, surely there will be lots of places where words are defined differently, or the same idea is expressed by different words. Whenever such is discovered, separate topics can be created to formally and rapidly "canonize" the usages and definitions of words with the best utility for all. If a new school of thought shows up with a new way to use words that is much more useful for all, such can be quickly "canonized" to demonstrate such and all camps can then quickly convert to this improved or better accepted terminology. (How many years, and what did it take to finally allow this to happen just for Pluto?)

Of course, all of this is just my POV. Keep all the differing POV coming in.

Thanks All!!

Brent Allsop

A few points:

This is off-topic, but mystics are very different from conventionally religious people, and are often strongly non-dualist. Though they can be difficult to understand, they're arguably much less superstitious than most religious types.

Functionalism is most often a form of materialism or physicalism, which in turn is monist. Some people use "property dualism" as a way to put down dual aspect theories. I agree with Jo that this sort of structure won't work.

"Depends on brain", or anything similar, is in my opinion very misleading. Why not just say what you mean? Supernatural concepts are not allowed in discussion of the hard problem! (BTW, IMHO, uploading is reincarnation.)

Robin,

That all makes sense. I guess this goes along with what I was talking about before, about not trying to create camps and structure for other beliefs (or even make claims against such) until people show up to support and defend such. I'm certainly glad we at least have fixall representing the Conduit / "Prior to brain" camp! I hope we soon get some mystics and others.

As you say, It is really hard to fully understand what all others believe, especially on this topic. I'm trying so hard to understand panpsychism, and your inter subjective panpsychism and stuff, but I just have real problems with this. Also, I've obviously got a lot to learn before I can fully understand Jo's Misinterpretation theory. But it is sure exciting to me to feel like we are making some real progress in this direction, even if it is only letting me know what it is I most need to study. What are you supposed to get started on when you first look at Chalmers' bibliography? There is simply no hope with only that, unless maybe, you are super Chalmers or some of you guys.

You've suggested we rename "depends on brain" to "Consciousness is not supernatural" right? I'm perfectly fine with that. Any other objectors for such from that camp? If I don't see any soon I'll propose that change.

Perhaps you could suggest a simple change to the actual statement text that would work with what you believe? You don't have to spend a lot of effort on it, everything is about small incremental steps by everyone. Let's just get something that works for you.

Thanks!

Brent Allsop

Brent,

Re "what to get started on", Susan Blackmore's Introduction to Consciousness and Conversations on Consciousness are both great, IMHO.

Re the statement, I'd leave the first paragraph as it is (though I might have some quibbles about the exact wording at a later date), but change the second paragraph to:

This does not, however, deny the possibilities either that a machine, without a brain as such, could be conscious, or that a person's consciousness could by some technically advanced method be cloned or transplanted into a machine or another body (or some hybrid of these). Support for this statement does not imply any particular position on these issues.

Robin,

I like your proposed second paragraph for the Not Supernatural camp. But I was wondering if you wouldn't mind if we add one additional line that I think would be important, even though such can be implied from what you have.

Does anyone object to these precise changes to the current Depends on Brain camp?

Name: Not Supernatural

Title: Consciousness is not supernatural and dies with brain

Rewrite of second paragraph:

This does not, however, deny the possibilities either that a machine, without a brain as such, could be conscious, or that a person's consciousness could by some technically advanced method be cloned or transplanted into a machine or another body (or some hybrid of these). Such cloning or rebuilding could be achieved simply from sufficiently detailed stored or recovered information about the state of the brain. Support for this statement does not imply any particular position on these issues.

Brent Allsop