Three epiphanies and how they are reflected in the idea for the proposed survey, and by its wording

The intent is NOT to survey a correlation between two personal beliefs: such a correlation would be not unexpected: rather the attempt is to correlate peoples' responses to queries about "what I know most fundamentally as a fact about the universe/reality/my existence", ie as opposed to 'opinon', and "my religious-type beliefs".

The nonMinded however will not recognize the validity of the "knowledge of fact" attested to by the Minded, and thus WILL consider both to be philosophical opinions.

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For years when I wrote about science & religion I was frustrated and perplexed - I could not understand why so many physicist colleagues were so adamantly against the possible relevance of awareness to quantum physics. It eventually dawned on me that there was a more fundamental issue involved - I was astonished to discover that many highly intelligent people did not believe in Mind! And given my clear perception of its existence I was frustrated why my attempts to enlighten them about its self-evident existence were not getting across.

At some point however I had an epiphany - becoming convinced that the reason for their rejection of its existence was simply because they lacked it. Literally. The flip side of this first epiphany was that there is no way to prove the existence of mind nor to scientifically prove it is absent in someone.

Although this explained why it is futile to attempt to convince the Mindless that Mind exists, it also pointed to the impossibility of publishing this speculation in a scientific journal since it would be impossible to prove that anyone does or does not possess a Mind, and especially since many in the scientific community are of the Mindless.

So even after realizing that a lack of awareness would be a simple reason why materialists cannot understand idealists, I was stymied as to how to prove this, or even publish this speculation - and then I had a second epiphany, that what I should do is create a survey and present the result, rather than making an unprovable claim.

To understand how a survey can attempt to resolve this impasse, let's think of what the survey could ask.

Let's consider a Minded individual experiencing deep compassion for some suffering entity. It could well be that a Mindless individual would be evolutionarily wired for altrusitic behavior, and that the neural currents induced by the sight of that suffering entity would be identical to those in the brain of the Minded individual, and perhaps lead to the same behavior in both, but the non-Minded individual does not understand what is meant by 'feeling' and will think that they should answer 'yes' when asked whether they felt deep compassion, so one cannot distinguish who is Minded and who is not by asking them whether they feel something or other.

So how could one distinguish a Minded and non-Minded individual via a survey?!

The essence of the second epiphany was the realization that the cluelessness of the non-minded regarding mind is a possible marker. ie that an intelligent philosophically well-read individual will know what is meant by "mind" vs brain, and if they have a Mind they will know it whereas if they do NOT believe in Mind it must be because they do not possess one, so to determine who does and does not possess Mind, although one cannot simply ask people whether they have feelings since all Mindless will presumeably answer in the affirmative there is another path, to utilize an indication, a corelate of the prsence of a Mind - one would simply ask them whether they believe in the existence of Mind and assume that those who are intelligent and educated and have read some philosophy and yet do not believe in it do not in fact possess one.

Therefore what I propose is to conduct a correlative survey-experiment (of academics at first) asking to what degree they belived in these: atheism, materialism, 'mind' as distinct from 'brain', human significance (possibly including some species such as dolphins and elephants etc), moral relativism vs the possibility of some sort of absolute morality, a truly-free will, whether they consider "intelligent design" to be at all a possibility, whether they believe there is any validity to some form of 'spirituality', some form of 'religion', whether they often experience existential angst, deep compassion, overwhelming wonder....

After collecting the responses I could determine the correlations between the beliefs.

I suspect that the findings will be illuminating, and will make it possible to understand why there is such a disconnect between the two camps of the Minded and the Mindless.

Choosing the survey quesitons:

Various characteristics could be added to the list, to disguise the intent of the survey, as well as to create the possibility of a statistical analysis (a la ML) of finding unexpected correlations (eg re the importance of music in their lives, the degree to which they experience passion or compassion, or etc).

For example the survey could also question literary tastes, favorite genre of music and movies, socio-political leanings (eg conservative vs liberal on a scale of 1-10), whether they are pro or anti vaccine, belief that aliens visited us vs not, degree of trust in government from 1-10, whether they are optimistic or pessimistic, adventurous or very prudent, whether art or music moves them deeply etc. (And those conducting the survey would not be apprised of the true purpose, so that one could create a sort of 'double-blind' situation.)

Perhaps at first the survey would be limited to academics, then to professional mathematicians, engineers, scientists and philosophers, and then those in the social sciences, humanities, arts etc, and then some in the general public, though more work on definitions might be needed if perhaps the notions of brain vs mind may be differenty understood in those wihout a scientific background.

It would also be interesting to cross cultural boundaries by surveying people in Japan and China, and for example to determine whether this divide manifests among those in Buddhist and Hindu cultures, or in which way it manifest, and whether there is a difference in this between Buddhists/Hindu religious leaders vs scientists in that society (who are perhaps more influenced by 'Western ways of thinking').