The fact is, neuroscientists cannot explain how the brain carries out the most elementary acts of cognition - for example, how I know the person lying beside me when I wake each morning is my wife. Some prominent scientists and philosophers have reluctantly predicted that the explanatory gap will never be closed. Even if neuroscientists crack the neural code, so that they can determine precisely which neural events are correlated with a given set of mental events, there may always be a strange incongruity between physiological and mental phenomena; something about the mind makes it peculiarly resistant to scientific reductionism. This philosophical position is called mysterianism. You don’t have to be a mysterian to wonder whether the explanatory gap between neurological theories and mysticism will ever be closed. Neurotheologians face not an explanatory gap but a chasm.
— John Horgan. Rational Mysticism. Mariner Books, 2003.
