Neuroscience’s Existential Crisis

Neuroscience’s Existential Crisis

Grigori Guitchounts

A paragraph I loved:

The nature of the scientific process is such that researchers have to pick small, pointed questions. Scientists are like diners at a restaurant: We’d love to try everything on the menu, but choices have to be made. And so we pick our field, and subfield, read up on the hundreds of previous experiments done on the subject, design and perform our own experiments, and hope the answers advance our understanding. But if we have to ask small questions, then how do we begin to understand the whole?

oh noooooo

 The tape goes on silicon wafers, and into Lichtman’s electron microscope, where billions of electrons blast the brain slices, generating images that reveal nanometer-scale features of neurons, their axons, dendrites, and the synapses through which they exchange information. The Technicolor images are a beautiful sight that evokes a fantastic thought: The mysteries of how brains create memories, thoughts, perceptions, feelings—consciousness itself—must be hidden in this labyrinth of neural connections.

A batshit assumption -- because the wiring (copper, fiber, electro-chemical) doesn't dictate the outcomes of logical processes encoded in the electronic signals they carry.

My prediction is that science will abstract natural patterns from the data.  Patterns from structures and activities that describe information processing, both subconscious and conscious, in a way that it will be understood in a cohesive and general manner.

This is just like the "magic" understanding that mapping the genome will bring and never found.  Good research - bad analysis from a wrong metaphysical assumption.   Sincere research has uncovered valuable data on epigenetics and other new discoveries.