I work on consciousness, a topic where interdisciplinarity is crucial to progress: you cannot properly understand this phenomenon without precisely identifying the resulting experience of interest itself (philosophy of mind, phenomenology), analysing the brain that brings it forth (neurobiology), the behavioural function this serves (psychology, ethology) and the evolutionary context it developed in, using reference models across a wide reference span (psychiatry, neurorehabilitation, animal minds) to identify what is arbitrary and what is necessary, and to spot the workings from bugs occurring, rebuilding what you have observed via coding to ensure you have understood it (computational neuroscience, machine learning, where suddenly you also transition from academia to industry) and then using math and theoretical physics to make the result precise in ways our language is incapable of doing (theory of machine learning, mathematical theories of consciousness). Yet the span of disciplines makes working together really difficult.
There isn’t just different terminology; often, they use the same terms but mean something related, but different (the term “consciousness” itself can refer to several related, but crucially distinct phenomena—being awake rather than in a coma, phenomenal consciousness, or access consciousness; so three people who say they are looking for the function of or neural correlates of consciousness can mean completely different aspects of it; and the term “recurrent network” means something crucial and related in both machine learning and neuroscience, but not the same thing, etc.). In other scenarios, they end up talking about/discovering/analysing the same phenomena, but use different terms and do not even realise, to a degree where they replicate a finding decades after it has already been disproven in another. (E.g. philosophers developed and then discarded epiphenomenalism, and then the same thing was developed in biology later, with the biological mindset making them unable to spot the—for philosophers—obvious bug.) You need to understand the content already, and read in quite deeply, to realise they are hitting on the same thing—it will not be apparent from titles or keywords, which is why the researchers involved don’t find each other in their literature search.
Just getting them together is already tricky. The researchers in question congregate in different places, and use different mediums (separate journals and conferences) and styles, many of which are not consciously reflected or pose significant barriers (I know tech minded folks who will refuse to read word files rather than LaTeX files, even though many journals outside of natural science and IT refuse to accept LaTeX files; or not engage in anything without math in it, because they cannot imagine another way of saying something precise enough to be meaningful; and philosophers who will find even the most approachable formula intimidating, while simultaneously littering the text with jargon; and then empirically minded folks who feel both kinds of work are so abstract as to make them meaningless) and different standards and focusses. There is also a lot of existing bad blood, often because the different fields felt underappreciated and attacked the contributions by other fields, making everyone feel disrespected and angry. They do very different status signalling, which is mutually distracting and distancing. It is socially delicate.
A big problem is that each of them is an expert in their field, but incompetent in other fields, which makes it extremely hard to recognise each others competence. And this makes it super hard to get them to listen to each other. A philosopher will look at a computational neuroscience paper and go, well, I don’t get the programming, the data analysis or the formulas, I’d need to really put in a lot of work to understand this, is it worth it? Wait, here, the dude is working on something I understand well, and in plain text! I will read that, and if it is good, then I will work through the rest. - And of course, this part is garbage. The same scientist who was so precise in his calculations will confuse multiple philosophical terms, equate things that are different, commit a logical fallacy, ignore an argument that is very well known in philosophy… and so the philosopher goes, the part that I can judge is terrible, why should I learn to understand the part that I currently cannot judge and that is really hard to follow? So the philosopher ends up dismissing all the other stuff, despite the fact that that stuff would have been gold. (And the same happens in reverse: the philosophy paper will have either no math, or terrible formatted math that has an obvious error in it, so the actual argument is never considered by the angered mathematician.) And the fact that if they got together, and understood each other, and fixed each others errors, the improvement in the paper would be drastic.
But if you manage to translate to them, show them how these findings are meaningful to them, justified to them, how they matter, the amount of low-hanging fruit is mind-boggling. It is like walking back and forth between several groups of researchers all studying the same damn thing, but barely talking to each other, and going… wait, you know the other group solved this a decade ago, right? Or; goddamn, the other group will be so happy to hear about this finding, they are totally stuck on it! You save so much time. And ideally, together, you understand a thing neither would have understood alone.
It is incredibly rewarding and wonderful work. Challenging, but allowing leaps of connection and productivity. And wonderfully varied. Seeing a phenomenon through such different lenses makes a huge difference in understanding for me. It is also a kind of work where my neurodivergence finally works in my favour. It helps to analytically analyse social structures. It helps that my brain makes more connections between things than regular brains, at the cost of a sole focus on one thing.
This is how I have always perceived my job.
I work on consciousness, a topic where interdisciplinarity is crucial to progress: you cannot properly understand this phenomenon without precisely identifying the resulting experience of interest itself (philosophy of mind, phenomenology), analysing the brain that brings it forth (neurobiology), the behavioural function this serves (psychology, ethology) and the evolutionary context it developed in, using reference models across a wide reference span (psychiatry, neurorehabilitation, animal minds) to identify what is arbitrary and what is necessary, and to spot the workings from bugs occurring, rebuilding what you have observed via coding to ensure you have understood it (computational neuroscience, machine learning, where suddenly you also transition from academia to industry) and then using math and theoretical physics to make the result precise in ways our language is incapable of doing (theory of machine learning, mathematical theories of consciousness). Yet the span of disciplines makes working together really difficult.
There isn’t just different terminology; often, they use the same terms but mean something related, but different (the term “consciousness” itself can refer to several related, but crucially distinct phenomena—being awake rather than in a coma, phenomenal consciousness, or access consciousness; so three people who say they are looking for the function of or neural correlates of consciousness can mean completely different aspects of it; and the term “recurrent network” means something crucial and related in both machine learning and neuroscience, but not the same thing, etc.). In other scenarios, they end up talking about/discovering/analysing the same phenomena, but use different terms and do not even realise, to a degree where they replicate a finding decades after it has already been disproven in another. (E.g. philosophers developed and then discarded epiphenomenalism, and then the same thing was developed in biology later, with the biological mindset making them unable to spot the—for philosophers—obvious bug.) You need to understand the content already, and read in quite deeply, to realise they are hitting on the same thing—it will not be apparent from titles or keywords, which is why the researchers involved don’t find each other in their literature search.
Just getting them together is already tricky. The researchers in question congregate in different places, and use different mediums (separate journals and conferences) and styles, many of which are not consciously reflected or pose significant barriers (I know tech minded folks who will refuse to read word files rather than LaTeX files, even though many journals outside of natural science and IT refuse to accept LaTeX files; or not engage in anything without math in it, because they cannot imagine another way of saying something precise enough to be meaningful; and philosophers who will find even the most approachable formula intimidating, while simultaneously littering the text with jargon; and then empirically minded folks who feel both kinds of work are so abstract as to make them meaningless) and different standards and focusses. There is also a lot of existing bad blood, often because the different fields felt underappreciated and attacked the contributions by other fields, making everyone feel disrespected and angry. They do very different status signalling, which is mutually distracting and distancing. It is socially delicate.
A big problem is that each of them is an expert in their field, but incompetent in other fields, which makes it extremely hard to recognise each others competence. And this makes it super hard to get them to listen to each other. A philosopher will look at a computational neuroscience paper and go, well, I don’t get the programming, the data analysis or the formulas, I’d need to really put in a lot of work to understand this, is it worth it? Wait, here, the dude is working on something I understand well, and in plain text! I will read that, and if it is good, then I will work through the rest. - And of course, this part is garbage. The same scientist who was so precise in his calculations will confuse multiple philosophical terms, equate things that are different, commit a logical fallacy, ignore an argument that is very well known in philosophy… and so the philosopher goes, the part that I can judge is terrible, why should I learn to understand the part that I currently cannot judge and that is really hard to follow? So the philosopher ends up dismissing all the other stuff, despite the fact that that stuff would have been gold. (And the same happens in reverse: the philosophy paper will have either no math, or terrible formatted math that has an obvious error in it, so the actual argument is never considered by the angered mathematician.) And the fact that if they got together, and understood each other, and fixed each others errors, the improvement in the paper would be drastic.
But if you manage to translate to them, show them how these findings are meaningful to them, justified to them, how they matter, the amount of low-hanging fruit is mind-boggling. It is like walking back and forth between several groups of researchers all studying the same damn thing, but barely talking to each other, and going… wait, you know the other group solved this a decade ago, right? Or; goddamn, the other group will be so happy to hear about this finding, they are totally stuck on it! You save so much time. And ideally, together, you understand a thing neither would have understood alone.
It is incredibly rewarding and wonderful work. Challenging, but allowing leaps of connection and productivity. And wonderfully varied. Seeing a phenomenon through such different lenses makes a huge difference in understanding for me. It is also a kind of work where my neurodivergence finally works in my favour. It helps to analytically analyse social structures. It helps that my brain makes more connections between things than regular brains, at the cost of a sole focus on one thing.