Although, I would counter that the imaging technologies employed as well as the chemical analyses of blood and spinal fluid are far from being just "a few measurements;" they're a fairly in-depth look into the state of your central nervous system at the time they are made.
But, if we are to hold up the complexity of human beings as a roadblock, let us then give equal treatment to the very complexity of the situation, itself. The light can change, your friend's presence adds different stimuli not present in the previous experience, the visitors in the museum have changed, the weather outside has changed, your physical well-being has changed, and dust has settled on the painting over the course of the week. Not to mention, the alignment of the planets have changed, resulting in ever-so-slightly different vectors of force upon your body from their gravitational influence, right? I mean, complexity is complexity; if we're going to say that the fact that we are complex systems negates the validity of the measurements made of those systems because those measurements can't take all the factors into account, then we must allow for all of the factors we can imagine, including astrology, right?
We can take the claim of complexity to utter absurdity. Perhaps the measurements I suggest aren't sufficient in themselves to isolate the root cause of your change in the experience. They are certainly sufficient, however, to find a change in you, and more than likely sufficient to begin finding a correlation between that change and the change of experience you report.
Where else would one look to begin isolating a change that only one person can report other than that person? |
