Neuroscience is one of the great successes of modern science. Its explanatory power is undeniable: neural circuits can be mapped, manipulated, modelled, and predicted with increasing precision. Behaviour can be altered by intervention; capacities can be impaired, restored, or reshaped. Few domains demonstrate more clearly what mechanistic explanation can achieve.
And yet, no scientific field generates more persistent unease about what has been left out.
This post is not concerned with whether neuroscience is correct. It is concerned with what neuroscience must exclude in order to be explanatory at all, and with the form of resistance that exclusion inevitably provokes.
Mechanistic Explanation Without Apology
Neuroscience proceeds by stabilising a particular explanatory cut:
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neural activity is taken as causally sufficient,
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cognition is treated as neural process,
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behaviour is explained through circuits, signals, and dynamics.
This cut is not optional. Without it, there is no neuroscience. Mechanisms must be isolable; variables must be measurable; causal pathways must be traceable.
The success of the field depends precisely on this restriction.
The Explanatory Cut
To make neural explanation work, something must be bracketed.
Experience — what it is like to perceive, to feel, to intend, to understand — is not denied, but it is repositioned:
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as report,
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as correlate,
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as output,
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as side-effect.
Meaning does not disappear, but it is displaced. It becomes something to be explained away, or explained indirectly, once the real causal work has been done elsewhere.
This is not an oversight. It is the cost of the cut.
Meaning as Relational Excess
Meaning is not a localisable object.
It is not contained in a neuron, a region, or a firing pattern. It is:
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contextual,
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perspectival,
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historically situated,
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relationally constituted.
Meaning arises only within a field of relations — between organism and environment, intention and action, history and anticipation. It is not a thing that can be isolated without being transformed.
For mechanistic neuroscience, this makes meaning structurally inconvenient.
The Return of the Suppressed
The persistence of certain debates in neuroscience is therefore unsurprising:
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the “hard problem” of consciousness,
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the explanatory gap,
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the unease surrounding reduction,
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the intuition that something essential has been missed.
These are not signs of ignorance or mystification. They are pressure points — places where relational excess presses back against a mechanistic cut that cannot accommodate it.
The more complete the neural account becomes, the sharper the discomfort can feel.
Intolerance, Not Failure
It is tempting to interpret this discomfort as resistance to science itself. That interpretation is mistaken.
What is resisted is not explanation, but closure: the implication that mechanistic sufficiency exhausts intelligibility.
The intolerance that appears here is an intolerance of meaning being treated as dispensable — as something that can be fully replaced by causal description without remainder.
This intolerance is not an error. It is structurally generated.
Why the Debate Cannot End
No amount of additional data will eliminate this tension.
That is not because neuroscience is incomplete, but because meaning does not belong to the same explanatory register as mechanism. To insist that it must be fully absorbed is to misunderstand what the explanatory cut accomplishes — and what it necessarily excludes.
Neuroscience can explain how neural activity constrains experience. It cannot turn meaning into a mechanism without destroying what makes it meaning.
A Relational Diagnosis
From a relational perspective, neuroscience reveals the familiar pattern:
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A field of constrained possibility (organism–world relations).
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A necessary explanatory cut (neural mechanism).
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Extraordinary formal success.
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Suppression of relational meaning.
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Persistent resistance and unease.
This is not a problem to be solved. It is a structure to be recognised.
Toward Artificial Intelligence
This matters because neuroscience is not the end of the story.
When mechanistic explanation is no longer applied to organisms, but to engineered systems — when optimisation replaces adaptation and design replaces history — the same intolerance reappears, amplified.
If meaning already resists reduction in brains, what happens when behaviour is generated without lived perspective at all?
That is where the next cut will be examined.
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