When conducting scientific research, you must adhere to the broad credo of building on what is already known. While you do have some creative leeway, it's only a small part of it. You're essentially expected to pick up where others left off, whether that's about the content or the methodological basis you want to use. The methodological basis must be rooted in something already scientifically proven.
This means that any theory that transcends the current scientific framework automatically remains bound to the very scientific framework it seeks to transcend. And therefore cannot be investigated. At least, not in a traditional scientific way.


Just a light-hearted example with a wink: 😊

Suppose we want to conduct scientific research into "whether there's a relationship between daily AI use and disintegration of consciousness in people with Dissociative Identity Disorder." Well, buckle up.

1st variable: 'daily AI use'. 
For the variable: daily AI use. As of May 2025, there's no validated self-report questionnaire available yet. So first, we need to set up a study to try and create a questionnaire that can measure the concept of 'daily AI use'. Well, that's one study, hopefully a year from now. But it still needs to be validated with different populations before we can use it for our research question. So, well, we're still a few years away.

Second variable: "disintegration of consciousness" 
Again, we don't yet have a validated instrument that can measure this variable. Moreover, there's intense debate about what "consciousness," let alone its disintegration, actually means. This is because it can't be measured empirically. We could use neuroimaging, but consciousness is too broad and layered to be contained within a single measurement instrument. So... we actually have a problem now. Because something not based on empirical evidence isn't methodologically sound enough... The best we can do is shift our focus to what is known from physics, but more so philosophical science and see what previous descriptions of these concepts have been made (David Chalmer, or Galen Strawson, for example) and whether we can possibly incorporate influences from ontology. Hmmmmm... The foundation of our scientific research has just become soft. And how exactly are we going to measure this nonlinear multidimensional variable that influences literally every psychological process in a statistical model? I was curious about that too how you were going to measure this without once introducing quantum mechanics.

The population: People with Dissociative Identity Disorder 
Seriously?! You're choosing "People with DID" as the population for this study?! They're incredibly sensitive characters. They're experiencing intense trauma. You really can't just approach them... Because they have no experience with anything as disruptive as deciding for themselves whether to participate in a study and being able to stop at any time. So that's going to take 120 years of ethics committee time 😊. 

Are we even allowed to conduct scientific research? 
This goes back to the beginning of my article, and perhaps the biggest problem. We're not allowed to conduct research at all unless we work at a university. And we have to have studied for almost 10 years and earned a PhD before we're allowed to do research.

Well, the end result is that we're 20 years further along. And meanwhile, everyone's "consciousness" may have disintegrated under the rapid development of AI. But we can't know that, because if we ask people these kinds of things directly on a large scale and want to investigate them in ways other than empirical research, I think people will go out naked. They have to; we didn't invent such an extremely complex system for scientific research for nothing. 😊😊😊😊😊😊😊