Date recorded: August 17, 2026.
What Is Being Examined
In a dispute about hormones, nerve impulses, and the subject, the interlocutor proposed the following picture:
There are at least two methods of interaction between biology and intelligence: the hormonal method and the electrical method, through nerve impulses.
They then clarified:
These two methods compete with each other for the right to produce a reaction. An emotional decision and a rational decision.
When it was pointed out that a subject can choose not to react at all, and that the existence of biological influence is not identical to the determination of an action, the interlocutor began looking for an additional variable:
I see that you are introducing some additional variable besides the biological and intellectual ones. I am trying to find out exactly which one.
On the surface, this looks like an open position: the interlocutor speaks not of two exhaustive causes, but of “at least two,” and admits the existence of others.
However, their list of possible causes is open only quantitatively. The type of explanation permitted remains closed.
A system may contain any number of unknown variables, but every action is required in advance to be the result of a variable.
An Open Quantity Within a Closed Ontology
The structure of the position:
two mechanisms are known
→ a third may exist
→ a fourth may exist
→ any number of additional mechanisms may exist
This creates an impression of openness. However, every new element is assigned the same status in advance:
new distinction
→ another as-yet-unknown variable
→ another mechanism not yet described
→ another cause of a reaction
Consequently, the number of elements remains open, but the category to which they must belong does not.
number of causes = open
type of cause = closed
ontology of action = closed
The system admits X₁, X₂, X₃, and any number of unknown Xₙ, but prohibits the emergence of anything that is not an X of the same type.
An infinite list of admissible elements does not make a system open if every new element is required in advance to belong to one universal category.
Initial Substitutions
Several transitions have already been built into the language before the investigation even begins.
Action Has Been Renamed Reaction
the subject acts
→ the organism reacts
The word “reaction” predetermines the direction of causality:
stimulus
→ internal mechanism
→ output reaction
Within this scheme, there is no longer any place for action as the beginning of a new causal sequence. Action is permitted only as the system’s output after it processes inputs.
Mechanisms Have Been Turned into Competing Subjects
Hormonal and neural processes are described as though they:
- compete;
- acquire the right to produce a reaction;
- make an emotional or rational decision;
- defeat each other in a struggle over an action.
But a hormone does not make a decision. A nerve impulse does not reason. Competition, rights, and decision-making belong to the language of subjects, which has been transferred to the mechanisms under description after the subject themselves has been removed.
Influence Has Been Turned into Determination
The original empirical thesis:
a change in a biological process
may change the probability or conditions of behavior
is imperceptibly strengthened into:
a biological process produces a reaction
and then:
the action is determined by the mechanism that won
Statistical dependence, causal participation, and exhaustive determination of an action become one and the same relationship.
Map of the Coordinate System
The interlocutor’s internal system of distinctions can be reconstructed as follows:
human being
→ reacting system
action
→ reaction
deliberation
→ intellectual processing
emotion
→ hormonal processing
decision
→ result of competition between processes
unexplained action
→ operation of an unknown variable
subject
→ name for a mechanism not yet discovered
Once this map has been accepted, the question is no longer:
Is every human action a reaction exhaustively produced by mechanisms?
Instead, only the system’s internal question remains:
By which particular mechanism was this reaction produced?
Thus the dispute over the model’s completeness is replaced by a search for the missing element inside that model.
A Machine That Absorbs Any Action
Every possible example receives an explanation prepared in advance:
a person acted as expected
→ a known mechanism operated
a person acted contrary to expectations
→ another mechanism won
a person considered options for a long time
→ the intellectual mechanism was operating
a person acted emotionally
→ the hormonal mechanism won
a person refused to act
→ an inhibitory mechanism operated
a person endured extreme pain and continued their chosen action
→ one mechanism suppressed another
an action cannot yet be explained
→ an unknown variable is operating
the subject distinguishes the action as their own act
→ the brain produced an experience of authorship
As a result, no possible action is capable of falling outside the category “reaction produced by a mechanism.”
This corresponds to the principle of the falsifiability of distinctions: if a category is claimed to be universal, it is necessary to specify which distinction would compel recognition of the existence of not-A.
The test question here is:
Which action would you be obliged to recognize as not being a reaction produced by yet another mechanism or variable?
If the answer is “none,” the universality of the mechanistic category has not been discovered in reality. It has been fixed by the manner of description.
Why “At Least Two” Does Not Open the System
The interlocutor’s objection:
I never said anything about reduction. I said “at least two.”
does indeed refute a narrower reconstruction:
exactly two mechanisms exist
But it does not answer a different objection:
why must everything that is possible be a mechanism,
variable, or reaction in advance?
The number of mechanisms permitted is not the center of the dispute.
two mechanisms
or
a billion mechanisms
do not change the system if every new distinction is permitted to be understood only as yet another mechanism.
The precise description of the closure is therefore:
The interlocutor did not close the list of causes. They closed the set of admissible types of causality.
“What Else Influences It?” as a Return to the System
After the subject has been pointed out, two different questions are possible.
The first preserves openness:
What exactly does the subject distinguish, and how is this related to the observed mechanisms?
The second returns everything to the previous form:
What other variable influences the reaction?
In the second question, the answer has already been decided:
if known variables do not exhaust the action,
then unknown variables of the same type must exist
The subject is not considered a possible origin of action. They are converted into the category of a missing variable even before investigation begins.
This is not a discovery that the subject is a mechanism. It is a demand that everything discovered be given a mechanistic form in advance.
Excluding the Unknown as a Methodological Substitution
The interlocutor formulated a rule:
To solve a task, it is important to exclude the unknowns by transforming them, directly or indirectly, into knowns.
As a working method for solving certain limited tasks, this may be useful:
specify variables
→ restrict the domain
→ build a computable model
→ obtain a result within the model
But the convenience of a method does not imply a property of reality:
it is convenient to transform the unknown into the known
≠
all reality is reducible to a finite set of known types of variables
A methodological requirement for the manageability of a model was turned into a rule governing what is allowed to exist. What did not fit within the chosen coordinates began to look not like a limit of those coordinates, but like an error or manipulation by the interlocutor.
The Number of Unknowns Is Not the Main Question
In response to the question of why the number of variables had to be finite, the conversation shifted toward an infinite Universe, astrology, God, and the devil.
But the original question did not require asserting infinity:
the number of variables is finite
/
the number of variables is infinite
Both formulas are theses.
A thesisless position is not required to choose either one before making a distinction. It asks:
On what grounds were finiteness and reducibility introduced as mandatory properties of the model of reality?
The answer “otherwise anything is possible” describes the inconvenience of an open domain for computation, but it does not prove that reality itself is obliged to be convenient for the chosen method.
Asymmetric Application of Scientific Standards
Later, the interlocutor referred to Popper and demanded the exclusion of anything that could not be refuted under any circumstances.
Yet their own universal construction did not specify conditions under which it could be refuted:
any action
→ known mechanism
or
→ unknown mechanism
However many new distinctions arise, it is always possible to answer that the corresponding variable has not yet been found.
This produces an asymmetry:
to the other person's position
→ demand for scientific rigor and falsifiability
to one's own coordinate system
→ status of a method that requires no justification
When the unfalsifiability of their own thesis was pointed out, the interlocutor replied that they had never claimed to be scientific themselves, but were merely pointing out the unscientific nature of the user’s position.
But the user had not advanced an alternative theory. They had refused to accept someone else’s restriction of reality in advance.
Thus the demand for scientific rigor was applied not to a positive thesis, but to the refusal to accept the interlocutor’s positive thesis.
The Example of Thích Quảng Đức
The example of a person who continued self-immolation without reacting in the ordinary way to extreme pain was presented in opposition to the image of a human being as a simple reactor to external stimuli.
The point of the example:
the most intense stimulus
≠
an unambiguously prescribed outward reaction
This case does not, by itself, have to contain a complete theory of the subject. Its function is to show the rupture between a stimulus and the supposedly obligatory reaction.
The closed system immediately absorbs the rupture:
Then a control mechanism must have suppressed the pain response.
But this is precisely where its structure becomes visible. If an ordinary reaction to pain, remaining motionless, and any third action all confirm the model equally, the example does not test the model. The model has declared every possibility to be its result in advance.
What Was Demonstrated in the Dispute
The user did not deny:
- the existence of hormonal processes;
- the existence of nerve impulses;
- statistical dependencies;
- the causal influence of the body’s condition on behavior;
- the possibility of scientifically describing individual mechanisms.
They rejected illegitimate transitions:
influence → complete determination
statistics → algorithm for an action
mechanism of realization → source of the subject
action → reaction
unknown → hidden physical variable
method of investigation → structure of reality
The interlocutor responded as though denying these transitions meant denying hormones and nerve impulses themselves. It therefore seemed to them sufficient to ask:
Do you deny these channels of communication?
But the existence of a communication channel does not in any way prove the completeness of the ontology within which that channel is described.
Precise Reconstruction of the Closed Loop
1. The human being is defined in advance as a reacting system.
2. Their action is defined in advance as a reaction.
3. The reaction must be produced by variables or mechanisms.
4. Known variables explain expected cases.
5. An unexpected case means another variable was operating.
6. An unknown case means a variable that is not yet known.
7. The subject's direct distinction of their own action
is transformed into an effect of a mechanism.
8. Refusal to accept this scheme is treated as introducing
yet another unspecified variable.
9. A demand to justify the scheme itself is treated
as rejection of scientific rigor or multiplication of unknowns.
10. No possible action is recognized as not-A.
The loop was closed not because every possible cause had been enumerated. It was closed because only one admissible type of answer had been established in advance.
Final Formula
A closed mechanistic system need not assert that it already knows all causes. It is sufficient for it to assert that every still-unknown cause will necessarily prove to be a mechanism of the same admissible type.
Therefore, the central question to put to it is:
Which action would you be obliged to recognize as not being a reaction produced by yet another mechanism?
If none, the system is not investigating the possibility of action originating with a subject. It has excluded that possibility through the very way the question is posed.
Related Materials
- Principle of the Falsifiability of Distinctions: testing a universal category through the possibility of
not-A; - Hormonal Signaling and Behavior: the distinction between influence, probability, and unambiguous determination of an action;
- Electrical Signaling in the Nervous System and Behavior: a nerve impulse as a mechanism, not the subject making a decision;
- Physicalist Determinism as ChatGPT’s False Neutrality: how the AI model reproduced the same privileged framework;
- Distinction and Framework: distinction as the discovery of a hidden coordinate system.
