From quantum theory to evolutionary biology, from neuroscience to artificial intelligence, and into ethics and politics, a pattern emerges with remarkable consistency. This is not a pattern of failure or incompleteness in the sciences, but a pattern of relational structure and its consequences.
Across these domains, explanation is always an act of cutting — stabilising units, privileging levels, fixing variables, and excluding relations that cannot be formalised within the frame. The power of explanation derives from this act. Its cost is equally unavoidable: the emergence of intolerances wherever relational excess resists containment.
Quantum Theory: Limits of Description
In quantum theory, the cut stabilises measurement, probability, and formalism. Phenomena resist full containment:
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Meaning returns as interpretive debate.
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Ontology is contested.
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The limits of description are misread as properties of nature.
Intolerance arises when limits are reified: resistance marks the field exceeding the cut.
Evolutionary Biology: Limits of Determinism and Reduction
In evolutionary theory, selection, fitness, and units of adaptation are stabilised. Variation, contingency, and multi-level causation press against these cuts:
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Determinism is resisted (Gould).
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Reduction is challenged (Rose, Lewontin).
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Units are disputed (Dawkins and opponents).
Resistance here signals the relational field of evolutionary possibility exceeding explanatory closure.
Neuroscience: Limits of Mechanistic Explanation
In neuroscience, neural circuits, causal pathways, and correlates of behaviour are stabilised. Meaning and lived experience are suppressed:
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Meaning cannot survive the explanatory cut.
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The “hard problem” emerges as a symptom, not a failure.
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Intolerance manifests as persistent unease, critique, and interpretive tension.
Artificial Intelligence: Limits of Optimisation
AI applies the same cuts more sharply:
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Behaviour is generated without perspective.
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Optimisation replaces participation.
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Agency is absent, responsibility unclear.
Intolerance here is acute: society and individuals register the absence of construal, producing resistance that cannot be ignored.
Ethics and Politics: Limits of Application
When explanatory cuts leave the laboratory and enter the world:
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Responsibility cannot be assumed by mechanistic or optimised systems.
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Political and social resistance arises where relational excess has been suppressed.
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Intolerance becomes a structural signal, guiding attention to the remainder of what has been excluded.
The Pattern Made Visible
Across all domains, the same structure recurs:
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Field of constrained possibility — the relational domain from which explanation draws.
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Necessary explanatory cut — stabilisation for intelligibility and function.
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Formal or operational success — predictive, mechanistic, or functional power.
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Suppression of relational excess — meaning, agency, contingency, perspective.
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Resistance, unease, intolerance — the relational remainder pressing back.
Intolerance is not a sign of error or inadequacy. It is diagnostic, revealing where the field exceeds the explanatory frame.
A Relational Reading Across Knowledge
What unites quantum physics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, AI, and ethics is not content, method, or domain. It is the same pressure from the same structural necessity: explanation cannot fully contain the relational field from which it emerges.
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Quantum indeterminacy, evolutionary variation, neural meaning, absent agency, social responsibility — these are all manifestations of relations that cannot be captured within the explanatory cut.
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They recur across scales, modalities, and contexts.
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They generate the same kind of resistance, insistence, and interpretive unrest.
Implication: Attentive Engagement
The work of reading science, technology, and society is not to resolve these tensions. It is to:
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Attend carefully to the relational remainder.
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Recognise intolerance as signal, not pathology.
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Act with awareness of what explanation must exclude.
Explanatory cuts produce power and understanding, but they also produce the field of what cannot be fully explained. To navigate the world responsibly, one must learn to live with that remainder — to interpret it, respond to it, and respect it as the structural truth it represents.
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