Relational Cuts and Intolerances: 3 Relational Cuts and Intolerances: A Capstone Reflection

The journey traced in this series has moved across domains:

• Quantum theory, where the limits of description generate epistemic and ontological resistance.

• Evolutionary biology, where determinism, reduction, and unit-centric reasoning provoke contestation.

• Neuroscience, where mechanistic explanation excludes meaning.

• Artificial intelligence, where optimisation produces behaviour without agency.

• Ethics and politics, where responsibility arises in response to suppressed relational excess.

• Complex systems, where climate models, economic projections, and social predictions reveal intolerance wherever relational complexity exceeds formalisation.

• Applied technologies, like CRISPR, where operational success intersects with ethical, systemic, and social remainder.

Across all these fields, a single structural logic repeats: explanation requires a cut, and the remainder of what is excluded presses back as intolerance.

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1. The Structural Pattern

The general pattern can be formalised as follows:

1. Field of Constrained Possibility
   A relational domain rich with interactions, contingencies, perspectives, and potential outcomes.

2. Explanatory Cut
   Stabilisation that allows intelligibility, prediction, control, or optimisation. Units, variables, or processes are fixed; relations that cannot be formalised are suppressed.

3. Operational Success
   The cut produces measurable, predictable, or actionable results.

4. Suppressed Remainder
   Relational excess — meaning, agency, contingency, perspective — that cannot be contained without undermining the cut.

5. Intolerance / Resistance
   Manifesting as discomfort, critique, debate, ethical challenge, or social friction. It is not an error; it is diagnostic of the structural limitation of the cut.

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2. Cross-Domain Regularities

Several features recur regardless of domain:

• Remainder is inevitable: exclusion is not incidental; it is constitutive of explanation.

• Intolerance is informative: resistance signals where relational excess presses against formalisation.

• Scale amplifies visibility: the larger the system or higher the stakes, the more acute the intolerance.

• Ethics and responsibility are relational: they emerge in response to suppressed elements, not from the explanatory system itself.

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3. Implications for Understanding Science and Knowledge

This capstone perspective reframes several assumptions:

• Explanation does not capture totality. Power and understanding are inseparable from the remainder it generates.

• Critique and resistance are structurally necessary, not merely contingent or subjective.

• Across domains, human attention, ethical reflection, and social judgement are essential precisely because explanatory cuts cannot contain relational excess.

In short: knowledge is always partial, action is always relational, and intolerance is always informative.

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4. A Relational Methodology for Reading Knowledge

The series now offers a coherent methodology applicable to any domain:

1. Identify the cut: what has been stabilised to allow explanation or intervention?

2. Map the remainder: what relational elements are suppressed by this stabilisation?

3. Observe intolerance: where and how does the remainder press back?

4. Analyse structural logic: how does the cut produce operational success and remainder simultaneously?

5. Reflect relationally: what ethical, epistemic, or social obligations arise from the remainder?

This method allows us to read knowledge relationally, recognising both its power and its structural limits.

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5. Conclusion: The Work of Attention

Across physics, biology, neuroscience, AI, social systems, and technology, the same cut is repeated. Across scales, the same remainder returns. Across human activity, the same intolerance arises.

The series shows that:

• Explanatory success is inseparable from relational remainder.

• Resistance, debate, and discomfort are signals, not failures.

• Attentive engagement with the remainder is the foundation of responsible action and ethical judgement.

In the end, the project does not resolve the tension. It illuminates it, making the landscape of knowledge, action, and responsibility legible. The cut is repeated; the remainder returns; and the work of reading and responding — attentive, relational, unsentimental — continues.

Relational Cuts and Intolerances: 2 Reading CRISPR Through Relational Cuts and Intolerances

The methodology of relational cuts and intolerances allows us to examine not just abstract patterns, but real-world scientific and technological controversies. To illustrate its power, we turn to CRISPR-based gene editing: a technology that promises precision, efficiency, and control over biological systems — yet generates intense ethical, social, and conceptual debate.

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Step 1: Identify the Cut

CRISPR explanation stabilises certain variables to make the phenomenon tractable:

• Genes as discrete, manipulable units.

• Editing outcomes defined by sequence change.

• Success measured in efficiency, specificity, and predictability.

This is the explanatory cut: it makes intervention possible and the technology operational.

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Step 2: Map the Remainder

What is structurally excluded by this cut?

• Relational biology: interactions between genes, epigenetics, and environment.

• Developmental and systemic complexity: unintended cascading effects across organism and ecosystem.

• Ethical and social context: how modification affects communities, future generations, and notions of naturalness.

• Perspective and agency: whose interests and values are included or omitted in design and deployment.

These elements form the remainder: essential relations that cannot be fully stabilised in the explanatory cut without undermining its operability.

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Step 3: Observe Intolerance

The remainder manifests as structured resistance and discomfort:

• Public unease: fear of “designer babies,” ecological risk, or ethical overreach.

• Scientific debate: cautionary calls, moratoria, and discussion of off-target effects.

• Policy friction: regulatory disputes and international disagreements.

These are not failures of science or technology. They are diagnostic signals of what the explanatory cut excludes.

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Step 4: Analyse the Structural Logic

The CRISPR cut produces both power and limitation:

• Power: precise editing, accelerated research, potential disease eradication.

• Limitation: relational effects remain inaccessible; ethical and systemic stakes are bracketed.

Intolerance is predictable: the more operationally successful the cut, the sharper the social, ethical, and conceptual pressure from the remainder.

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Step 5: Reflect Relationally

Reading CRISPR relationally encourages attention to:

• Who is affected: humans, ecosystems, and future generations.

• What is suppressed: relational, ethical, and systemic complexities.

• How resistance signals constraints: regulatory caution, public discourse, and scientific debate are informative, not merely obstructive.

This perspective does not prescribe a single policy or ethical position. It highlights where attention is structurally required, where relational excess must be acknowledged, and where responsibility cannot be delegated to mechanistic success alone.

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Lessons from CRISPR

Applying relational cuts methodology to CRISPR reveals several insights:

1. Technological mastery is inseparable from relational remainder: intervention without attention to suppressed relations produces structural tension.

2. Intolerance is informative, not incidental: opposition, debate, and discomfort illuminate the boundaries of explanation.

3. Ethical and practical engagement is relational: responsibility arises at the interface between the cut and the remainder.

4. The methodology scales: it is applicable across disciplines, technologies, and social domains wherever explanation stabilises at the cost of relational exclusion.

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Conclusion

CRISPR demonstrates the practical stakes of relational cuts and intolerances: scientific and technological success always carries with it remainders that demand attention, interpretation, and ethical engagement. Recognising these patterns allows researchers, policymakers, and citizens to navigate complex, high-stakes domains without mistaking operational success for comprehensive understanding.

The methodology is not a remedy for controversy; it is a tool for reading it, revealing structure where debate and discomfort appear.

Relational Cuts and Intolerances: 1 A Methodology for Reading Science and Knowledge

The preceding series has traced recurring patterns: across quantum theory, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, AI, ethics, and complex systems, explanatory success is always accompanied by suppressed relational excess and the intolerances that follow. This post articulates a formal account of these phenomena, presenting a methodology for recognising, analysing, and interpreting relational cuts and their consequences in any domain of knowledge.

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1. The Explanatory Cut

Definition:

A relational cut is the stabilisation necessary for explanation to operate. It isolates certain variables, units, or levels of analysis, thereby rendering a field tractable and intelligible.

Key Features:

• Selective actualisation: Only particular aspects of the relational field are stabilised.

• Necessary exclusion: Relations, perspectives, and contingencies that cannot be formalised are suppressed.

• Generative power: Cuts make prediction, control, and optimisation possible.

Analytical Use:

Identifying the explanatory cut allows the reader to see what the explanation assumes and what it excludes structurally, rather than merely assessing its empirical adequacy.

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2. The Suppressed Remainder

Definition:

The remainder is the relational excess excluded by the cut: meaning, agency, contingency, or perspective. It is what persists outside the explanatory frame and inevitably presses back.

Key Features:

• Relational: The remainder exists in the network of relations that explanation cannot stabilise.

• Persistent: It reappears wherever the explanatory cut is applied.

• Non-resolvable: It cannot be incorporated into the explanation without destroying its function.

Analytical Use:

Mapping the remainder allows the reader to locate sites of resistance, unease, or ethical concern, and to understand them as structural rather than accidental.

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3. Intolerances as Diagnostic Signals

Definition:

Intolerances are the observable effects of relational excess pressing against explanatory cuts: resistance, debate, discomfort, ethical dilemma, or social friction.

Key Features:

• Not errors: They are not mistakes of science, modelling, or understanding.

• Structural markers: They indicate the boundaries of what can be explained within a given cut.

• Cross-domain recurrence: Similar intolerances arise wherever relational cuts are enacted, independent of discipline.

Analytical Use:

Recognising intolerance as signal allows one to read it relationally — not as a problem to solve, but as information about the explanatory structure itself.

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4. Relational Field Mapping

Definition:

The relational field is the totality of interactions, contingencies, and perspectives from which the explanatory cut draws.

Key Features:

• Dynamic: It cannot be fully stabilised, only partially constrained.

• Multi-scale: It spans levels of organisation and temporalities.

• Ethically and epistemically salient: Suppression of its elements generates real-world consequences.

Analytical Use:

Mapping the relational field clarifies the scope and limits of explanation, and guides attentive engagement with what remains suppressed.

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5. Methodological Steps

To apply this framework systematically:

1. Identify the cut: Determine what has been stabilised to make explanation tractable.

2. Map the remainder: Identify what relations, perspectives, or contingencies are structurally excluded.

3. Observe intolerance: Trace the manifestations of suppressed relations as debate, critique, resistance, or unease.

4. Analyse structural logic: Understand how the cut, remainder, and intolerance relate systematically.

5. Reflect relationally: Consider ethical, social, and epistemic consequences of the cut and the remainder.

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6. Advantages of the Method

• Provides cross-domain analytical clarity: applicable in physics, biology, neuroscience, AI, social sciences, and beyond.

• Avoids simplistic critiques of “incompleteness”: intolerance is a signal, not a failure.

• Integrates epistemic and ethical awareness: suppressed relations often carry normative or practical significance.

• Reveals patterns of human knowledge as structurally constrained rather than purely accidental.

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7. Concluding Principle

Every act of explanation necessarily produces both power and remainder. Relational cuts generate formal success; intolerances mark the boundaries of that success. Attentive engagement with the remainder allows us to read knowledge relationally, ethically, and responsibly.

This methodology does not resolve tension; it renders the structure legible, enabling scholars, practitioners, and citizens to navigate complex explanatory domains with clarity and care.

The Intolerances of Scientific Explanation: 7 The Metapattern of Relational Intolerances

Across the sciences, technology, and complex human systems, a single structure recurs. It is not contingent upon discipline, method, or content; it is a pattern of explanation itself. Understanding it requires stepping back, not to solve individual debates, but to observe what explanation systematically excludes — and what that exclusion produces.

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The Pattern Revisited

In every domain we have explored:

1. Quantum Theory: Limits of description generate resistance where phenomena cannot be fully captured.

2. Evolutionary Biology: Determinism, reduction, and unitary selection provoke opposition when relational variation and contingency are suppressed.

3. Neuroscience: Mechanistic explanation excludes meaning, producing enduring unease.

4. Artificial Intelligence: Optimisation excludes agency, generating acute ethical and conceptual discomfort.

5. Ethics and Politics: The remainder of explanation presses back as responsibility and social resistance.

6. Complex Systems: Climate science, economics, and social networks reveal intolerance wherever relational excess cannot be contained.

Across these fields, the same structural logic recurs:

• Explanatory Cut: A necessary stabilisation for intelligibility and function.

• Formal Success: Prediction, control, or optimisation within the cut.

• Suppression of Remainder: Meaning, agency, contingency, perspective, relational complexity.

• Resistance / Intolerance: Debate, discomfort, critique, social unrest — the relational field returning.

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Explanation and Its Limits

This metapattern teaches a simple yet profound lesson:

Explanation does not exhaust the world; it produces a field of what it cannot contain.

Attempts to treat explanatory cuts as final or sovereign are always met with the return of the suppressed. Resistance, discomfort, and intolerance are not failures — they are signals of relational excess pressing against stabilisation.

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Remainder as Structural Signal

Meaning, agency, contingency, and perspective are not anomalies. They are the inevitable corollaries of explanation itself:

• Where explanation is most complete, the remainder is clearest.

• Where predictive power is greatest, the relational field presses back most insistently.

• Where optimisation succeeds, the absence of construal is experienced as unease or ethical imperative.

Intolerance is diagnostic. It reveals the boundaries of what explanation can stabilise and what remains irreducible.

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Across Domains, Across Scales

From subatomic particles to ecosystems, from neurons to AI systems, from policy to society, the metapattern repeats:

• The cut is made.

• Success is achieved.

• Remainders press back.

• Intolerance manifests.

No domain escapes it. The scale or modality changes; the logic remains.

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Living with Relational Intolerances

The imperative of this view is neither pessimistic nor defeatist. It is attentive:

• Attend to what has been excluded.

• Read resistance as a structural signal.

• Acknowledge that power, prediction, and optimisation carry inevitable remainder.

• Recognise the relational field as ethically and practically significant.

This is the work of living responsibly in the presence of explanatory success.

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The Metapattern Made Visible

Taken together, the domains illuminate a general truth:

Relational intolerances are not accidental frictions of knowledge — they are the inevitable consequence of explanation itself.

To understand the world is to make cuts.

To act within it is to encounter what those cuts leave behind.

The task is not to close the gap, but to read it, respond to it, and remain attentive to the irreducible field that always returns.

The Intolerances of Scientific Explanation: 6 Beyond the Laboratory: Relational Intolerances in Complex Systems

The pattern of relational intolerance traced in quantum theory, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, AI, and ethics is not confined to those domains. Wherever explanation stabilises, cuts are made, and relational excess is suppressed, the same intolerances reappear, often in amplified form.

This post examines this recurrence in domains of heightened complexity: climate science, economics, and social systems. Its aim is not to solve these problems, but to make the structural pattern legible.

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Climate Science: The Intolerance of Uncertainty

Climate science confronts a field of immense relational richness:

• Atmosphere, ocean, biosphere, human activity, feedback loops.

• Processes spanning seconds to millennia.

Explanatory cuts are necessary: models simplify, parameters are fixed, projections are probabilistic.

The suppressed remainder — uncertainty, contingency, local experience — returns as:

• public anxiety,

• policy resistance,

• political dispute.

Intolerance here is not irrational. It is the signal of what the models cannot fully contain, pressed up against the stakes of human action.

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Economics: The Intolerance of Agency

Economic modelling stabilises agents, preferences, constraints, and markets:

• Rational actors, equilibrium, incentives, optimisation.

Relational excess — social norms, historical contingency, ethical stakes, unpredictable behaviour — is bracketed.

Resistance manifests as:

• market crises,

• political revolt,

• critiques of reductionism.

Once again, agency and meaning return as pressure, forcing attention to the relational field outside the explanatory cut.

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Social Systems: The Intolerance of Scale

Sociology, urban planning, and public policy operate across complex relational networks:

• Individuals, communities, institutions, infrastructure.

Cuts are made to simplify: categories, variables, and causal relations.

The suppressed remainder — emergent dynamics, cultural specificity, lived experience — produces unrest when policies fail or social predictions misfire.

Intolerance signals the limits of explanation at scale: the field always exceeds the form, no matter how sophisticated the model.

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Repetition and Amplification

Across these complex systems:

1. Field of constrained possibility — immense, relationally rich domains.

2. Necessary explanatory cut — models, abstractions, variables, agents.

3. Formal or operational success — predictions, optimisation, interventions.

4. Suppression of relational excess — uncertainty, agency, meaning, contingency.

5. Resistance and intolerance — crisis, debate, dissent, or unanticipated outcomes.

The structure is identical to what we observed in physics, evolution, neuroscience, and AI. Only the stakes, scale, and visibility differ.

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The Cumulative Insight

These patterns suggest a general principle:

Wherever explanation is stabilised, resistance will recur in proportion to what is suppressed.

Complexity, human participation, and collective action make the remainder more visible, more socially consequential, and harder to ignore. Intolerance in these contexts is therefore not a sign of error, but a diagnostic of structural necessity.

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Navigating the Intolerable

Understanding the recurrence of relational intolerances allows us to:

• anticipate where explanation will be resisted,

• recognise signals of suppressed relations,

• act attentively in domains where stakes are high,

• engage ethically with the limits of our models.

Intolerance becomes a tool, not an obstacle — a way of reading what the explanatory cut cannot contain, and a guide for responsible action within the field.

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Toward a Cross-Domain Perspective

From quantum physics to climate modelling, the cut is repeated.

The remainder — meaning, agency, contingency, perspective — returns.

Intolerance is not accidental; it is structural.

Recognising this across domains enables a new understanding of explanation itself: powerful, necessary, incomplete, and always relationally constrained.

The Intolerances of Scientific Explanation: 5 The Landscape of Intolerance: Relational Cuts Across Domains

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.

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Quantum Theory: Limits of Description

In quantum theory, the cut stabilises measurement, probability, and formalism. Phenomena resist full containment:

• Meaning returns as interpretive debate.

• Ontology is contested.

• The limits of description are misread as properties of nature.

Intolerance arises when limits are reified: resistance marks the field exceeding the cut.

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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:

• Determinism is resisted (Gould).

• Reduction is challenged (Rose, Lewontin).

• Units are disputed (Dawkins and opponents).

Resistance here signals the relational field of evolutionary possibility exceeding explanatory closure.

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Neuroscience: Limits of Mechanistic Explanation

In neuroscience, neural circuits, causal pathways, and correlates of behaviour are stabilised. Meaning and lived experience are suppressed:

• Meaning cannot survive the explanatory cut.

• The “hard problem” emerges as a symptom, not a failure.

• Intolerance manifests as persistent unease, critique, and interpretive tension.

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Artificial Intelligence: Limits of Optimisation

AI applies the same cuts more sharply:

• Behaviour is generated without perspective.

• Optimisation replaces participation.

• Agency is absent, responsibility unclear.

Intolerance here is acute: society and individuals register the absence of construal, producing resistance that cannot be ignored.

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Ethics and Politics: Limits of Application

When explanatory cuts leave the laboratory and enter the world:

• Responsibility cannot be assumed by mechanistic or optimised systems.

• Political and social resistance arises where relational excess has been suppressed.

• Intolerance becomes a structural signal, guiding attention to the remainder of what has been excluded.

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The Pattern Made Visible

Across all domains, the same structure recurs:

1. Field of constrained possibility — the relational domain from which explanation draws.

2. Necessary explanatory cut — stabilisation for intelligibility and function.

3. Formal or operational success — predictive, mechanistic, or functional power.

4. Suppression of relational excess — meaning, agency, contingency, perspective.

5. 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.

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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.

• Quantum indeterminacy, evolutionary variation, neural meaning, absent agency, social responsibility — these are all manifestations of relations that cannot be captured within the explanatory cut.

• They recur across scales, modalities, and contexts.

• They generate the same kind of resistance, insistence, and interpretive unrest.

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Implication: Attentive Engagement

The work of reading science, technology, and society is not to resolve these tensions. It is to:

• Attend carefully to the relational remainder.

• Recognise intolerance as signal, not pathology.

• 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.

The Intolerances of Scientific Explanation: 4 Exclusion and Responsibility: The Ethics of the Intolerable Cut

The series so far has traced a recurrent pattern across scientific domains: explanation stabilises, cuts are made, relational excess is suppressed, and resistance emerges. Meaning, agency, contingency, and perspective press back against the forms that claim to contain them.

But what happens when these explanatory cuts leave the domain of science entirely? When their products — predictive power, mechanistic control, optimisation — are applied in the world, the remainders no longer remain theoretical. They begin to generate real consequences.

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The Ethical Stakes of Exclusion

When explanation excludes meaning or agency, it does not merely bracket them. It shifts responsibility:

• In neuroscience, neural explanation can predict behaviour, but cannot own the lived experience it manipulates.

• In AI, optimisation can generate performance, but cannot hold accountable the actors or systems affected.

• In economics, models can dictate policy, but cannot account for the human stakes of those policies.

The explanatory cut produces domains of action without the corresponding domains of construal. Where there is action but no perspective, ethical responsibility cannot be assumed; it must be deliberately recognised.

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Politics as the Return of Suppressed Relations

The field of constrained possibility does not vanish when models are applied socially or politically. Instead, it returns insistently, as debate, dissent, and resistance:

• Communities resist policies derived from models that neglect context.

• Stakeholders protest decisions that arise from purely mechanistic optimisation.

• Citizens critique AI systems that act without accountability, or that redistribute power without participation.

Intolerance in politics is therefore not a failure of governance. It is the mirror of intolerance built into the explanatory cut itself.

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Responsibility Without Sovereignty

When explanation is applied in the world, responsibility cannot be delegated to the system, model, or algorithm. It cannot be absorbed by predictive power or mechanistic insight.

Responsibility must arise relationally, acknowledging what has been excluded by the explanatory cut:

• Recognising what perspective has been bracketed.

• Accounting for relational consequences that cannot be formalised.

• Treating the field of possibility as morally significant, even when it cannot be fully contained.

In other words, ethics is always imposed retroactively upon the remainder of explanation.

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The Structural Signal

Across science, technology, and policy, the same structural signal repeats:

1. A cut stabilises explanation.

2. Remainders of meaning, agency, and perspective are suppressed.

3. Resistance and intolerance emerge.

4. When applied in the world, these suppressed relations demand attention as ethical and political exigencies.

Intolerance is not accidental. It is diagnostic. Where explanation has cut too sharply, responsibility and resistance arise naturally.

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Living With the Intolerable Cut

The lesson is not that science, AI, or policy must do better in some abstract sense. Nor is it that ethics must bend to explanation.

It is that the world always exceeds explanation, and that responsibility arises precisely at those points of excess.

• Where meaning has been bracketed, attention must be restored.

• Where agency has been optimised away, accountability must be asserted.

• Where contingency has been neglected, judgment must remain open.

The explanatory cut creates power. That power cannot escape the relational field from which it was drawn.

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Conclusion: Attention as Ethics

The work of ethics and politics, in a world shaped by powerful explanatory systems, is not to correct error, but to read the remainder.

Attention, care, and reflexive awareness become the instruments of responsibility. They are the practices that make possible a coexistence with explanation’s exclusions — and with the intolerances those exclusions inevitably generate.

Where science, technology, or policy succeeds, the relational remainder speaks. The task of the responsible actor is to listen, and to act in the field that explanation cannot contain.

The Intolerances of Scientific Explanation: 3 What Explanation Cannot Contain

Scientific explanation is among the most powerful achievements of human thought. It stabilises patterns, constrains possibility, and renders the world tractable. Across domains, it delivers prediction, control, and coordination at scales previously unimaginable.

And yet, wherever explanation succeeds most completely, something presses back.

This post is not an argument against explanation. It is an attempt to name, carefully and without polemic, what explanation cannot contain.

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Explanation as Productive Constraint

To explain is not merely to describe; it is to constrain.

Every explanation performs an act of selection:

• it fixes a unit,

• privileges a level,

• establishes variables,

• and excludes relations that cannot be stabilised within the frame.

This exclusion is not a flaw. It is what makes explanation possible. Without it, explanation dissolves into an undifferentiated field.

But exclusion has consequences.

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The Remainders of Explanation

Across the sciences we have traced, certain elements return with remarkable consistency:

• Meaning, in neuroscience.

• Agency, in artificial intelligence.

• Contingency, in evolutionary biology.

• Description itself, in quantum theory.

These are not gaps waiting to be filled. They are remainders — aspects of the relational field that do not survive the cut required for explanation.

They do not disappear. They return as discomfort, debate, resistance, and intolerance.

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Why These Remainders Persist

The persistence of these remainders is not due to insufficient data or immature theory.

It is structural.

Meaning is relational and perspectival; explanation requires stabilisation.

Agency requires participation; explanation abstracts from participation.

Contingency resists inevitability; explanation favours necessity.

To contain these fully would be to abandon explanation itself.

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The Error of Closure

The most common mistake made in response to these remainders is the insistence that nothing has been excluded.

This insistence appears in many forms:

• claims that meaning is “just” neural activity,

• claims that agency is “just” optimisation,

• claims that contingency is “just” ignorance,

• claims that description mirrors reality without remainder.

These moves are not clarifications. They are acts of closure — attempts to deny the cost of the explanatory cut.

It is here that intolerance emerges most sharply.

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Intolerance as Signal

Intolerance arises when explanation is asked to do what it cannot:

• to exhaust the field it cuts into,

• to absorb relational excess without remainder,

• to replace perspective with mechanism.

Resistance, anger, and conceptual revolt are not pathologies in this context. They are signals — indications that the field exceeds the form.

To read them as errors is to misread the phenomenon.

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Explanation Without Sovereignty

What emerges from this series is a view of explanation that is powerful but not sovereign.

Explanation:

• works,

• constrains,

• clarifies,

• and always leaves something out.

This is not a weakness to be repaired, but a condition to be acknowledged.

Scientific understanding advances not by eliminating these remainders, but by learning to live with them — by recognising where explanation must stop without mistaking that stopping point for failure.

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A Relational Orientation

Seen relationally, explanation does not reveal a world independent of perspective. It actualises intelligibility from within a field of constrained possibility.

Meaning, agency, and contingency are not external to science. They are what science must continually negotiate, suppress, and encounter again as resistance.

The task is not to resolve this tension, but to remain attentive to it.

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What Remains

What explanation cannot contain is not noise or illusion. It is the relational field itself — the conditions under which explanation becomes possible, and beyond which it cannot go.

To recognise this is not to retreat from science, but to understand its power more clearly.

The cut will be made again.

The remainder will return.

And the work, each time, will be to read that return with care.

The Intolerances of Scientific Explanation: 2 Artificial Intelligence and the Intolerance of Agency

Artificial intelligence does not introduce a new problem.
It exposes an old one without the protective ambiguities of biology.

Where neuroscience still deals with organisms — embodied, historical, affect-laden — artificial intelligence presents behaviour without life, optimisation without experience, and performance without perspective. What was previously contested now becomes stark.

The discomfort that surrounds AI is therefore not primarily ethical, social, or speculative. It is ontological.

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Behaviour Without a Subject

Artificial intelligence stabilises a particularly severe explanatory cut:

• behaviour is produced by optimisation,

• success is defined by performance metrics,

• learning is adjustment within a predefined space of possibility.

From within this frame, AI systems can outperform humans, adapt to environments, and generate outputs indistinguishable from intentional action.

What they do not do is act.

There is no perspective from which the behaviour occurs. No stake, no concern, no situated point of view. The system performs, but it does not participate.

This absence is not accidental. It is required.

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Optimisation as Explanatory Closure

AI explanation is at its most confident when it is most minimal:

• inputs,

• objectives,

• loss functions,

• updates.

Nothing else is needed. No meaning, no intention, no understanding.

This is not a failure of AI. It is its triumph. The system works precisely because agency has been excluded from the explanatory frame.

But this exclusion carries a cost.

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The Return of Agency

The debates that surround AI are strikingly repetitive:

• Is it intelligent?

• Does it understand?

• Can it intend?

• Is it responsible?

• Is it conscious?

These questions are often dismissed as category errors — as anthropomorphic confusion or misplaced intuition. But their persistence suggests something else.

Agency is not being mistakenly projected. It is being structurally withheld, and its absence is felt.

The discomfort does not arise because AI is misunderstood, but because behaviour now appears without construal.

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Agency as Relational Phenomenon

Agency is not a property that can be added to a system once performance is sufficient.

It is:

• perspectival,

• situated,

• historically and socially constituted,

• bound to participation in a field of significance.

Agency exists only where actions matter to the one acting — where outcomes are not merely optimised, but owned.

AI systems do not lack agency because they are insufficiently complex. They lack it because they are not sites of construal.

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Why the Intolerance Intensifies

In neuroscience, meaning resisted reduction while remaining attached to living bodies. In AI, that attachment is gone.

The same explanatory cut now produces a sharper effect:

• behaviour is flawless,

• performance is measurable,

• explanation is complete,

• and yet something is unmistakably missing.

This generates an intolerance of agency — a refusal to accept that behaviour alone exhausts action.

The insistence that “nothing is missing” is precisely what provokes resistance.

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Responsibility Without Ownership

This intolerance becomes acute around responsibility:

• Who is accountable?

• Who decides?

• Who acts?

The answers cannot be found inside the system. Responsibility does not belong to optimisation procedures.

The attempt to locate agency where there is only execution produces anxiety — not because the system is dangerous, but because the explanatory cut has removed the very locus where responsibility normally resides.

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A Familiar Structure, Now Exposed

Once again, the same pattern appears:

1. A field of constrained possibility (action within a world of significance).

2. A necessary explanatory cut (optimisation and performance).

3. Extraordinary success.

4. Suppression of construal.

5. Intolerance and unease.

AI does not create this structure. It reveals it without distraction.

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What AI Forces Us to See

Artificial intelligence confronts scientific explanation with its own limit:

• Explanation can produce behaviour.

• It cannot produce participation.

• It can optimise outcomes.

• It cannot generate perspective.

The discomfort surrounding AI is not a failure to understand machines. It is a recognition — often unarticulated — that agency cannot be engineered by optimisation alone.

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Closing the Loop

From quantum theory to evolutionary biology, from neuroscience to artificial intelligence, the same cut has been repeated:

• stabilise explanation,

• suppress relational excess,

• provoke resistance.

Artificial intelligence is simply the point at which the absence becomes impossible to ignore.

What remains is not to resolve this tension, but to learn how to read it — not as error, not as fear, but as a structural signal of what explanation cannot contain.

The Intolerances of Scientific Explanation: 1 Neuroscience and the Intolerance of Meaning

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.

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Mechanistic Explanation Without Apology

Neuroscience proceeds by stabilising a particular explanatory cut:

• neural activity is taken as causally sufficient,

• cognition is treated as neural process,

• 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.

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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:

• as report,

• as correlate,

• as output,

• 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.

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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:

• contextual,

• perspectival,

• historically situated,

• 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.

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The Return of the Suppressed

The persistence of certain debates in neuroscience is therefore unsurprising:

• the “hard problem” of consciousness,

• the explanatory gap,

• the unease surrounding reduction,

• 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.

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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.

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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.

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A Relational Diagnosis

From a relational perspective, neuroscience reveals the familiar pattern:

1. A field of constrained possibility (organism–world relations).

2. A necessary explanatory cut (neural mechanism).

3. Extraordinary formal success.

4. Suppression of relational meaning.

5. Persistent resistance and unease.

This is not a problem to be solved. It is a structure to be recognised.

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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.