Wikipedia Hard Problem Article

[Astra052]

Given the level of organisation of the Guerilla Skeptics, it would be great if the Essentia Foundation or some other motivated folks kick-started a Materialism Skeptics group of Wikipedia editors.

Yes. I hope Essentia has an explicit Wikipedia strategy. If not, they should get one. This is what it takes to get your ideas heard.

Indeed, the materialist bias of Wikipedia is frustrating (though admittedly, in these days of science denialism and kooky conspiracy theories the skeptics are also doing some good stuff).

For instance, the entry for parapsychology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology references this article (https://skepticalinquirer.org/2019/07/w ... t-be-true/), which argues that any evidence for psi can be ignored because "every claim made by psi researchers violates fundamental principles of science". The Journal of Scientific Exploration devoted almost a whole issue to debunking this and a related paper (https://www.scientificexploration.org/j ... sue-4-2019).

I mean to be fair that's a pretty fringe jorunal that writes about UFOs and cryptids but I do think that's a close minded view of parapsychology.

[JustinG]

Yeah, I think it does have a reputation for being fringe (maybe due in part to Wikipedia!), but the few articles I've looked at seemed pretty rigorously argued.

[Simon Adams]

One of the statements I made in this section was;

From an idealist perspective, matter is a representation or image of mental processes, and supporters suggest that this avoids the problems associated with the materialist view of mind as an emergent property of a physical brain.

One of the editors has suggested that this needs a reference. The sentence before has a reference and so does the sentence after so they seem a bit picky. I could just use one of Bernardo’s papers (which would directly support this phrasing), but it would be good to use something different if possible. It’s a fairly basic statement, and I could use almost any paper on the hard problem and idealism, including the Chalmers article I link to below it (in theory I could even use something like this https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 2605001831 !).

However does anyone know of a good paper I can use as a reference here?

If not I may just use https://philpapers.org/rec/KASCAW or

[Eugene I]

I thank a reference the BK's article would be good enough there, as long as the editors are ok with that

[Simon Adams]

Yes you’re right ... it’s a published paper so why not use it.