One thing that occurs to me when discussing neuroscience generally is how disconnected most of the discussion is from the underlying mechanics of the system being discussed. In fact most neuroscience discussion tends to be *really* bad about the biology part of it, which is probably how it ended up ingesting so many terrible concepts in the first place.
Neuroscience is a specialization of biology. Biology is a specialization of chemistry. And chemistry is a specialization of physics. For externally consistent science, physical properties are chemical properties are neuroscience properties. For now, that’s all the evidence really supports.
When we are talking about DNA, we are talking about chemistry, and chemistry is a study of physical interactions. Every single scrap of every single bit of RNA and protein and all that other stuff is *inert*, or not biological UNLESS it interacts.
This is a critical understanding for neuroscience because it is so focused on what the physical objects do (e.g. this neuron magically does this thing), that as a whole neuroscience misses the importance of the interactions taking place. “Dopamine” in an of itself doesn’t have interesting properties chemically, but it does facilitate interesting interactions. GABA isn’t really that interesting chemically, but it does facilitate interesting interactions. And as proof of this, we can substitute these chemicals artificially and induce the same interactions.
Neuroscience really needs to understand that these physical interactions don’t facilitate behavior, behavior occurs because of these physical interactions. Behavior is the output of the the physical interaction equation.