Wed, 19 Nov 2003

Tonight I finally killed the last bug I was struggling with, and now I have numerical verification of my strange little theory. An initial manuscript will be en route to some people by the end of the week. That makes this the perfect time for me to decide that no, after all, working in the neurosciences is not that great an idea, not from a professional point of view (I don't have the necessary intuition to advance the field there, and my addition to the numerical methods used is tapped out now) or financial (the end of corporate funding is at hand, with the upcoming changes in the laws on drug patents), but philosophical. You see, there are things man was not meant to know. Really. When the priests of Delphi carved the words "Know Thyself," they were demonstrating what a callous bunch of bastards they are.

The scientific ways of approaching the Delphian goal are difficult, compared to the previous known method, of treating the adage as the prompt to get into a collegiate bull session full of navel gazing, circular logic, bad data, cultural prejudices, and come up with some contrived and insufficient insight into the human existence. It worked for Aristotle, and Freud, and Jung, and God help us all, it worked for Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden. That is, for some definitions of "worked." It got them published. It got other people laid. As for the method's success at helping people to know themselves, the less said the better.

About 150 years ago, some poor benighted souls set out to fullfill the Delphian goal through the scientific method. That pursuit has brought out some mighty comical results. Among my favorites is the Kaczynski experiment. (The article to which I link tried to attribute the misunderstood mathematician's descent to madness to the experiment. I do not buy it, and neither did some of the other subjects of it.) The question the experiment sought to answer was what kind of physiological effects are seen in a guy who is being attacked intellectually about his worldview. The method employed was amusing. From the article:

"As Murray [the experiment designer] described it,

First, you are told you have a month in which to write a brief exposition of your personal philosophy of life, an affirmation of the major guiding principles in accord with which you live or hope to live. Second, when you return to the Annex with your finished composition, you are informed that in a day or two you and a talented young lawyer will be asked to debate the respective merits of your two philosophies.

[End of article excerpt.] The utter irreproducibility of any novel finding in such an experiment is obvious. Beyond finding out that this is unpleasant and causes a textbook physiological fight-or-flight response, you can't find anything that can be applied across subjects, because of the huge variation among the subjects in just about every single aspect of the experiment. So your results wind up being published in the medical journal Duh.

When the scientific method fails to find new insights into the human mind, one should be relieved. Because when it does, the consequences can be real bad. Why am I saying this? Because a neuro guy at Johns Hopkins (I think) recently conducted experiments to assess effectiveness of some advertising strategies. The study was done for an advertiser. And that is where neuroscience gets scary. It enables people to engage in pursuits that treat man as a means to an end rather than an end in himself. And I want no more of it. There are other reasons why neuroscience should give you the heebie jeebies. Damn. Ran out of steam for this entry. More on it some time.