The Brain Is Not the Whole of Man

Does Neuroscience Overturn Humanism and Transcendence?

In September 2025, an international consortium published a brain-wide map in Nature. The project tracked activity in more than 600,000 neurons across 279 brain regions, covering nearly the entire mouse brain. The researchers looked for the place where decisions happen. They did not find one. Instead, decision-related activity spread across memory, emotion, movement, and reward systems all at once. As Ilana Witten put it:

One of the important conclusions of this work is that decision-making is indeed very broadly distributed throughout the brain, including in regions that we formerly thought were not involved.

In popular commentary, discoveries like this quickly become a verdict. The headlines almost write themselves: there is no centre, therefore there is no self. Decisions can be predicted, therefore free will is an illusion. Mystical experience has neural correlates, therefore transcendence is nothing more than a brain state. Such conclusions have influential defenders. Thomas Metzinger, for example, argues that what we call the self is a model generated by the brain rather than a metaphysical inner substance.

But that is not neuroscience. It is reductionism in a lab coat.

The Mistake Every Age Makes with New Technology

Functional brain imaging is a powerful tool. It can show which regions become active when someone decides, feels, remembers, or prays. Earlier work by Libet suggested that neural preparation for a simple movement begins before a person becomes consciously aware of the intention to move. Later fMRI studies by Soon and Haynes found that the outcome of a simple left-or-right choice could be decoded from brain activity up to about 10 seconds before it entered awareness.

For the reductionist, those few seconds settle everything. What we call free will becomes, on that view, a retrospective story consciousness tells itself after the real work has already begun.

But the fact that decision-making starts outside awareness does not mean consciousness has no role to play. It may arrive later, not to initiate but to review, approve, revise, or inhibit what has already been set in motion. Everyday life often feels exactly like that: something comes to mind, and only then do we judge it, endorse it, or refuse it. Few of us would say that the first stirrings are therefore somehow less our own.

There is another problem as well. Laboratory experiments usually test simple, arbitrary choices: move a finger, press a button, pick one image over another. Whether the same logic governs moral struggle, long reflection, resistance to temptation, or life-changing decisions remains unsettled. These experiments tell us something real, but they do not tell us everything.

Neuroscience and Humanism: A Mechanical Transfer

What popular interpretations often do is commit an old logical error. We might call it the mechanical transfer of categories from one level of description to another.

Imagine someone examining a novel under a microscope. They see letters, paper, ink. They conclude that there is no plot, no characters, no meaning, only cellulose and pigment. They are not exactly wrong. They have simply described the novel at the wrong level. Neuroscience can describe the human being as mechanism in one valid sense. But just as a novel is not only a collection of marks, a person is not only a mechanism.

The same holds for the brain. A neurobiological description, at the level of neurons, synapses, and cortical regions, can be true without being complete. It does not exhaust what happens at the level of lived experience. The fact that the self is not located in a single neuron does not mean it does not exist. It may exist as a process: distributed in time, dispersed across a network, yet still real. A storm is not located in a single drop of water, and still it exists.

Transhumanism and the Real Challenge

Transhumanists tend not to lose much sleep over this dilemma. For them, the question “does the self exist?” is poorly framed. The more urgent question is how to improve it. Strengthen memory. Quiet fear. Redesign identity. If neurotechnology can read and alter preferences, why dwell on whether the subject exists in some classical sense? Why not simply redesign the subject?

The position has obvious appeal. It is also dangerous. Once the human being becomes a product to optimize, another question immediately rises: who sets the standard of the better human being? Corporations? The state? Algorithms?

That is the real challenge posed by neuroscience. The danger does not lie chiefly in some final proof against free will or transcendence. It lies in the misuse of neuroscientific findings by those eager to turn partial descriptions into total explanations.

The Trap of Thinking Free Will Does Not Exist

In 2017, Marcello Ienca and Roberto Andorno proposed a set of new rights for the age of neurotechnology: cognitive liberty, mental privacy, mental integrity, and psychological continuity. Their argument was straightforward. If new tools can access, infer, and perhaps alter our intentions and mental states, then the inner domain of the person needs explicit protection.

Critics answered that such rights presuppose an inner domain in the first place. If neuroscience suggests that this interiority is only an illusion, what exactly are we defending?

That is the real point. The deepest question is not whether free will exists in some final and settled sense. It is what happens when another actor, a company, a government, an algorithm, gains the power to read and modify our preferences before we ourselves fully recognize that we have them.

Where Are We Now?

Neuroscience has not overthrown humanism. It has not proved that transcendence is an illusion. What it has shown, rather, is how much depends on interpretation.

You can look at a centreless brain map and say: there is no self, only a network. Someone else can look at the same evidence and reply: the self is not a thing but a process. You can look at experiments on decision-making and say: free will collapses. Or you can say: consciousness may enter later, as a mechanism of correction rather than initiation.

Reductionism is, in the end, a choice. It is attractive, simple, and flattering to the desire to think science has already explained everything. But it is not a proof. What truly threatens humanism and transcendence is not neuroscience itself. It is the mechanical transfer of neuroscientific findings to a level at which they begin dictating what a human being is. Every age makes that mistake again. It takes the part for the whole, and mistakes a tool of inquiry for a picture of reality. In that sense, neuroscience and humanism do not stand in necessary opposition. The real conflict begins only when one level of explanation tries to conquer all the others.

Read this article in Polish: Czy odkrycia neuronauki zmieniają człowieka? To błąd każdej epoki