The dogmatic insistence that all human experience—thought, emotion, consciousness, morality—is nothing but the firing of neurons and the flow of neurotransmitters. This ideology dismisses psychology, philosophy, culture, and subjective meaning as mere epiphenomena, claiming the brain scanner reveals the only true reality. It’s the belief that you are your connectome, and love is just oxytocin.
Example: After reading a profound novel, someone says, "Your feeling of awe is just a predictable neural reward pathway responding to pattern recognition. The book isn't meaningful; it's just efficiently stimulating your inferior frontal gyrus." This neuroreductionism flattens art, meaning, and humanity into a medical diagram.
by Dumu The Void February 9, 2026
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