Brent Good idea to get ASSC interested but you need to run your letter through a spell-checker and carefully proof read it before sending it off (...Origan, wikipedida, speek...!). I don't have time to devote to this right now but hopefully others will contribute. I would suggest you delete "The only problem is, nobody has yet tried to look for or measure any of this in any kind of rigorous way so nobody knows about such yet." which is questionable, ugly and adds nothing. Also, using capitals is problematic - do you really want to say "THE ONE"? cheers Richard

Mind Theoreticians, I'm preparing a draft of a letter I'd like to send to the executive committee of the [http://assc.caltech.edu/index.htm Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness]. I'm using some of your names in this letter, so let me know if this is not OK. I'd love to get any feedback or thoughts any of you might have on any of this to help improve it. Thanks! Brent Allsop ------------------------ * To: ASSC Executive Committee (David Rosenthal, Giulio Tononi, Thomas Metzinger, Axel Cleeremans, John-Dylan Haynes, Zoltan Dienes, Christof Koch, Susan Martinez-Conde, Alva Noe) * From: Brent Allsop * Date: May 24, 2009 Hello ASSC directors, My name is Brent Allsop, and I represent a growing group of grass roots volunteers working on a project with a goal of rigorously measuring the scientific consensus amongst experts on the study of consciousness. Many people claim there is a scientific consensus on issues of Global Warming, but petitions like the Origan Petition (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_petition) and wikipedida articles like this List of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_global_warming_consensus). seem to cast serious doubt on such claims of consensus. A growing group of us believe the field of the study of consciousness has just the opposite of this problem. Everyone seems to think there is no agreement in this field whatsoever on much of anything. I believe not only is there some significant amount of scientific consensus in this field, I believe there is a revolution taking place as we speek in what the majority of experts believe is the best theories of consciousness. The only problem is, nobody has yet tried to look for or measure any of this in any kind of rigorous way so nobody knows about such yet. Canonizer.com is being developed by a grass roots group of volunteers as a collaborative tool to enable just this. It is a kind of wiki system with 'camps' and survey capabilities. Experts can 'join' camps to help improve them in comparison to competing camps. The goal is to first collaboratively develop and negotiate concise statements of the most well accepted theories (and terminology to describe such) in an always progressing way, then to quantitatively measure who thinks which of these theories are the best, and finally to rank experts using a peer ranking process (see: http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/81) to quantitatively determine who are the experts to enable the measurement of consensus amongst said experts (as compared to the general population, PhDs, Christians, Atheists,... and other ways which are also possible at canonizer.com for comparison purposes.) I believe having a rigorous and comprehensive survey representation of the best theories of consciousness that focuses on what people agree on, rather than what everyone does not agree on (as seems to be the case in the literature today) would be a real boon. Not only would such enable us to concicely state what the most well accepted theories were, we would be able to see revolutions in fields ocure as they were happening. I would expect that seeking to measure scientific consensus of this field of study would be well within the goals and purposes of ASSC as it seeks to promote the scientific study of consciousnesses? We are looking to colaberate with anyone interested in such a project. For example, would there be any kind of research grant money that anyone might be interseted in providing to help with such a project? We're also working on an academic paper arguing for the importance of such, and describing the methodologies we are using. We'd like to get something like this paper published in the ASSC journal Psyche. Would such be appropriate and possible? We've already made significant progress and a growing number of experts like John Smythies, Steven Lehar, Jonathan Edwards and others are already contributing to the process. Two example topics that have a good start at showing some significant (even if only early and not yet comprehensive) consensus are these: * http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88 Theories of Consciousness * http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/23 The Hard Problem of Consciousness But of course any survey is only as valuable as the number of people that take the survey. We would love to know concisely and quantitatively what all experts in this field think we do and do not know about consciousness going forward as ever more scientific data comes in. Personally, I think this field of study is about to make THE greatest scientific discovery of all time. And I believe a significant amount of THE ONE true theory that predicts this science of Mind might already be out there. Wouldn't it be great to rigorously watch as everyone converts to THE ONE true theory as it happens? We would of course love to have any thoughts or recommendations any of you might have on any of this. Upward, Brent Allsop