Theories of Mind and Consciousness

Our goal with this topic is to track theoretical scientific progress, so that we can rigorously demonstrate not only how much consensus progress we have made, but also to encourage experimentation under a falsification paradigm to narrow the field of contenders. Eventually, we should arrive at the camp that best describes consciousness, supported by evidence.

Alternative sites focus on disagreements, which tends to increase polarization. For example Wikipedia polarizes everyone around the Qualia issue. As you can see in that topic on qualia, Daniell Dennett is one of the top “critics of qualia”. Instead, Canonizer enables people to find things they agree on, then negotiates terminology more people can accept. As you can see here Dennet’s Predictive Bayesian Coding Theory camp is in a supporting sub camp position to the consensus Representational Qualia Theory super camp.

The focus of this topic is on the phenomenological nature of consciousness, asking the question: “What is it like?” Some people refer to this as the “hard problem” and talk about an “explanatory gap”.

If you want to help push this most important of all theoretical fields of science forward, please sign or support the camp you find most convincing. Then recruit others to do the same. Eventually the experimentalists will take notice, perform the experiments as described, the results of which will force people into the correct camp. We will then have a definitive scientific consensus nobody can doubt.

This topic is part of the Consciousness Consensus Project.