Defining consciousness ( cNEZ )
I stumbled upon this in discussions in the old Psyche-D newsgroup, which has been closed down in 2007. What struck me also reading papers and books about cNEZ, was that people seem to understand very different things where they use the word cNEZ. Then I found Thomas Metzingers statement: ‘cNEZ is an ill-defined term’ which alerted me.
The Tuscon conference was coming up and I thought: how long will it take these guys to rename the conference from “Toward a science of consciousness” to something that indicates that the science actually took off and exists. 2008 was the 8th biannual conference held in Arizona, which makes it like 15 years to make progress on that path. That may be too long and not having a definition to start with may be a reason why.
Next I envisioned a cNEZ conclave, where a large group of cNEZ cardinals would be locked up in a place until they show by producing white smoke that they have agreed on some definition. So next I drafted an open letter to the conference and started spreading it. The responses were quite encouraging, people who responded were Noam Chomsky, David Chalmers, Christof Koch, Bernard Baars who I would all consider cNEZ cardinals.
Then I tried to really go for it and organize an Internet work-group to tackle the question. I got much help from Alfredo Pereira jr. and Jonathan Edwards and two weeks after Tucson the actual work-group has been constituted. The original idea of a conclave did not happen. One of the reasons is that there has been a similar effort sponsored by the mind science foundation last year, which by some is regarded as a failure. There may be many reasons inside the scientific community, especially amongst those people who think cNEZ is worth it’s own science. They may not be cooperative, may be egocentric. They may strive for their own definition that is superior the that of all others.
Two remarkable statements I got in private talks from veterans: David Chalmers said: ‘we need more definitions’ and Christof Koch said: ‘ we just need a rough definition’. Whatever may be true, it was quite an adventure so far and I really enjoyed it. It was more challenging than I expected and my own role has grown much bigger than I wanted.
So I am curious where this venture, that Arnold Trehub called ‘my quest’, leads to.
Tags: consciousness, definition
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