Late to the party, but another neuroscientist here. I have a few comments that I feel add to this thread.
First, I have always felt that most all neuroscience research feels like we're studying an 'ad infinitum' problem when it comes to making any sense of life, nature, consciousness, the human/mammalian condition, etc. To me, the job has turned to a relatively boring work affair. Breakthroughs into mechanisms, or discovering new structure-activity relationships, or new concepts backed by evidence are all cool as hell--but I've found that reaching a certain level of understanding in the area of neuroscience hasn't helped my personal life at all, nor has it given me any meaning at all. It's just work like any other field.
I think the reductionist approach in biology will eventually lead us to a point of diminishing returns. We may 'know' a lot at that point, but in the end, who really cares? I've suffered from mental health issues my entire life. And in going down the neuroscience path, I thought maybe someday I might be able to make sense of my own internal machinery, and in doing that, come up with some kind of way to outsmart it. Nope. It's only made me realize how biased a lot of research is. It's also made me realize how polarized the researchers are, and how they embody a specific world view of a disordered state and cling to it.
No one has any effing clue as to how something like depression or bipolar disorder really work. We can identify transmitters and proteins involved. We can identify structures involved. We can describe the psychology of it all. Yet, no one can explain exactly what mania is. No one can explain why depression happens, nor what that is. I could go on, but to me it feels like fish studying water. At this point, it feels like some of these mental health issues are not so much diseases, but archetypes selected over the last 100k years for group selection. The mystical types that have an overabundance of empathic pain and devote their life to healing the rest of the tribe, is just one example. Maybe some individuals are born as novelty generators for everyone else? Or maybe it's about busting through the restrictions of tradition? No one knows, but where there is disorder there is also order. It may not appear that way from an outsider's perspective, but I firmly believe the mystery of mental illness may reveal itself to be equal part mental stability for the collective group. Mental instability in one individual is grounding to all others that can learn from that one individual. Yes, I am arguing that mental instability leads to greater stability for the group--trailblazers to new states of allostatic equilibrium.
Second, I want to posit a logic argument. Life is weird. Life itself seems weirder than psychedelic realms. To me, the psychedelic realms seem to have intrinsic order in a mathematical way. Life has a lot more 'noise.' Therefore, life doesn't make logical sense. But we can make this conclusion using logic itself. And life as we know it includes the entire universe. So, logic must span greater than our known universe. That in itself should make you stop and think. There appears to be some consistent structure with greater span than all life and physics as we currently understand it.
I spent a few years working in development. That basically means you mess up embryos in novel ways that don't kill them, then you study the functional output. A few years was enough to realize that everyone walks around pretending they understand a lot about this bizarre thing we call reproduction and the origin of life. But to me, I just felt exhausted trying to save face and pretend to understand. The field is ripe with farce and delusion about how this all comes about. Just because you can explain in mechanistic terms how two cells become one, and then begin dividing, and then become an embryo doesn't mean you understand where it comes from.
I've always leaned to the spiritual side of things, but after 6 years in neuroscience research I have to say that I have learned I AM a spiritual person. You can take a macro zoom picture, then take a macro zoomed picture of the picture, then take a macro zoomed picture of the picture again, and keep going ad infinitum, but you're still just studying snapshots... How far do you take this reductionist approach before you question the reductionist approach? It's just another complex behavior we exhibit as human beings. How about a new way of integrating known and unknown? I don't yet know how to do that, and I am afraid of overanalyzing in the grand scheme. All I know is that feeling subjectively gives me a greater sense of meaning, purpose, and inner peace than does studying things objectively. The purpose of life is to live, after all. Everything else feels like distraction--endless distraction from what we feel.
