So a week or so turned into nearly 5 and a half months. What prompted this? Well, it is the nature of this "blog", I guess.
Phosphenic Fractal Monkey (PFM) was originally intended as an online, open storehouse of essays on various topics both scholarly and personal (usually a combination of both). The problem was that I became a perfectionist about it. There was an essay I was trying to hammer out, off-and-on, for much of those 5 months. With this post, I don't wish to descend into some half-assed literary version of 8 1/2, but I do want to chronicle, in some way, the intellectual crisis that hovered over any attempt at intellectual growth.
However, recursion does play a preponderant role in the reasoning to follow. Unfortunately, this also means that there will be a lot of referencing to myself and my experiences. It all feels very egotistical, and I feel like footnoting a David Foster Wallace-esque commentary on the very fact that I am mentioning myself, with the net effect of only furthering my descent into egotism.
The earliest dream I can assuredly recall happened when I was around 4 years old. In the kitchen/"dining room" (large enough, but one in the same), we had a TV set up with an old vomitous army green color couch and footrest, fastened into existence with some abrasive fabric. The TV was off, it was at night, and I was rapidly becoming tired. With my body largely resting on the chair's seat, knees bent and legs crossed in the air at the ankles, my head rest under my hands on the footrest, elbows digging in to the fabric until there formed thick blunt red indentions.
I recall the image of myself staring at the reflective TV screen, and falling asleep. I stayed in that position for around an hour until I woke. During that nap,I dreamt a dream. My dream was almost laughably simple, yet complex for a 4 year old, and visually clear in ways that have become harder to replicate as I've grown older.
In my dream, I was laying on the chair just as I was in actuality: on my stomach, head in hands, calves and feet cross in air. And about 2 inches above and 6 inches to the right of my head, a tiny cloud-like bubble appeared, and then about 4 inches up and to the right of that, a cloud roughly twice its (the original cloud's) size appeared. And then, about 4 inches up and to the right of the second cloud, a much larger cloud appeared, and inside it lay the image of myself, laying on the chair, legs half-cocked, crossed and angling upwards, head in my half-fisted hands, staring at the empty TV screen with a set of three white clouds diagonal to my head, with an image of myself laying on the couch, with a set of three white clouds above...
Oh joy! A simple recursive illustration. But I was 4, give me a break, it was cool as hell. The point is, I believe that formative experiences such as this dream heavily impacted the way I think, and that my normative (prescriptive) and positive (descriptive) beliefs directly follow. And this thoroughly "modernist" tendency towards recursivity extends to my interests in science and philosophy.
The past 6 months have been spent doing a ton of introspection about what areas of academics in which I should be investing my efforts. Very broadly: with the knowledge we now have with models of cognitive psychology, with the knowledge we have of how our emotional processing and higher-level processing (planning, communication, etc.) interact, and with neuroimaging tools we can use to compare and contrast activation for various simple cognitions, I think it is time that the social and intellectual pressures that give rise to the scientific endeavor be analyzed scientifically. A "science of science".
Now, as with any area of inquiry, it is fraught with potential problems of method, and more generally, ambiguity as to what sort of, *cough*, epistemological heuristics one can use. By that, I mean some sort of idea about what knowledge is interesting in this particular field. Obviously, the whole of neuroscience is involved in the practice of science, but what aspects are the most relevant? How does one conceptualize arguments within the history and philosophy of science so that they are amenable to scientific analysis? Additionally, how does one conceptualize them with the potential political and ideological biases they might have, explicitly or implicitly? What can we assume about all scientists? Are there potentially quantitative differences between how, say, an evolutionary biologist thinks about some aspect of science versus how a psychologist thinks, or a particle physicist? Are there differences in how theoretical physicists think about problems versus how experimental physicists think?
Or perhaps these fundamental questions must get to the heart of critical thinking itself. How might our own skepticism be biased? What kinds of top-down or bottom-up relationships exist between potential neural correlates of critical reasoning and, e.g., emotional processing, or processing in sensory modalities or various association cortices?
My dream goal would be to jump-start this field. In addition to foundational problems to be sorted out, there are practical issues. How in the hell can you get funding for this kind of research? Are there any clinical populations one could use to get funding and research this field on the side? Scientists who've had strokes? This is truly the most "basic" of basic science.
Yet I feel it has enormous import. And general questions about the biological foundations of scientific inquiry seems to me to be a growing issue in the academic community. This was made quite salient to me by the latest question posed by John Brockman to dozens of prominent intellectuals (scientists, philosophers, artistic and public intellectuals...) for his Edge Foundation. Edge is an organization that aims to locate the so-called "Third Culture", or C.P. Snow's hypothetical group who could bridge the gap between the humanists (those in the arts, philosophy, literature, etc.) and the scientists. Every so often, Brockman proposes a "provocative" question to these people. It is basically an attempt by Brockman to find those who are rapidly becoming the oracles of truth for our society, and to humanize them by mining for the extremities of their thoughts and beliefs. The question in 2005 was "What do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it?" The question in 2006 was "What is your dangerous idea?" In previous years there have been other questions, but the answers to the 2005/6 questions were both published as books, though they are still available on Edge's website. However, the most recent question for 2007 was "What have you changed your mind about? Why?"
It seems like a fairly innocuous question. And yet, to my surprise, I have never seen such a confluence of opinions by our best/most famous scientists that generally call into question both the standard scientific conceptions of human nature, and the standard assumptions about the nature of scientists. In profoundly transparent ways, many of those who answered this question expressed a somewhat pessimistic view of human bias and its effect on science. Their comments reflect the growing literature in the philosophy of science, which has tried to characterize common ways that scientific knowledge is created, accepted and/or rejected, as well as the ways that scientific communities operate. What stands to eventually be included here is a scientific analysis of these ideas.
A "science of science", in my view, would also entail an extremely rigorous formulation of terminology that is sorely lacking in the philosophy of science, at least what I've read of it. Never has a term been so abused, so riddled with confounded meanings, as "science". It is kind of amazing to me that these broad terms have been fleshed and parsed so little, and I don't think that any serious attempt at unearthing the neural networks that allow "science" to take place can proceed without parsing out the many possible meanings of "science" and related concepts.
Not only that, but any serious program would have to deal with considerable historical analyses as "case studies". Right now I am reading David Hull's Science as a Process, where the entire first half of the book is devoted towards chronicling with incredible depth the decades long battle between the various scientists and schools of thought that were involved in biological systematics, or basically, the ways that organisms can (should!) be classified. I have not gotten to the second half, but it is to be an analysis of how scientific communities work, how they should work, how they work best, and whether or not this immense case study is reflective of the decidedly prescriptive ideas that philosophers of science have posited over the years.
So these thoughts are what've been occupying my thoughts lately. HOPEFULLY, with this initial post out of the way, I can get over the perfectionist streak and start posting stuff. Check back in another 5 months...
