Open letter to Dr.s Daniel Dennett and Keith Frankish,

There is a new emerging camp, at Canonizer.com, very supportive of Daniel Dennett’s ideas about consciousness currently being called Representational Functionalism.  Despite rapid achievement of some significant consensus for this new camp, at that level, it still lags behind the leading expert consensus Property Dualism camp.

In response to the theoretically revolutionary success of this new emerging camp, the experts supporting the currently leading “classic qualia” property dualism camp are working to canonize a new version of their camp statement containing a significant attack against this upstart.  This attack is against the ‘mistake’ most often attributed to Daniel Dennett, when people claim we don’t have qualia "it just seems like we do." [Consciousness Explained P. 375].

The experts in this upstart camp, in response to this pending attack, have proposed that Daniel Dennett doesn’t mean that we don't have some subjective experiences.  It would be tautologically false to say,  "We don't have the experiences that we seem to have, we just seem to have them."  Instead, they suggest that Dennett is saying something like "we don't have experiences that have any magical properties beyond the causal structure and dynamics of physics, it just seems like we do."

Is this response being taken by this upstart camp the best consensus thinking by the most experts?  How many other experts are there that think this is a completely inadequate response, for the reasons being given in the newly proposed Property Dualism statement containing this attack?  Is this really a mistake?  Are there any other better ways to think about this issue out there, and how much consensus might there be for such?  Both camps would like to know, what Dr. Dennett, and other's in this camp thinks, so we can avoid this kind of speculation in any statements that end up making it through the canonization process.

This is an open letter in that we are seeking to survey for what everyone thinks on this issue.  How many people will be in the camp Dennett will ultimately end up in, before he ends up there, after all the arguments and science are said and done?

The new version of Property Dualism camp, and related sub camp statements, containing this attack are being collaboratively developed by everyone in a wiki way on Google docs, to eventually be 'canonized' once finalized by everyone in their respective camps.  We invite any and everyone to help improve this process, whatever your current working hypothesis is regarding consciousness.  Here are the links to the new Goggle doc statements containing this attack:

• Property Dualism
• Material Property Dualism
• Macro Material Property Dualism

As always, the goal of this open survey process is to collaboratively develop concise and quantitative descriptions of the best theories of consciousness, and to rigorously measure and track such as we approach what could turn out to be the greatest and most consensus building scientific discovery of all time.

Upwards,

  Brent Allsop

  Volunteer Consciousness Survey Project