Theory of Source Opacity: Mechanism of Informational Content Formation in Neural Architecture

This article presents the Theory of Source Opacity, a neurobiological theory of informational content formation. The theory proposes that content generated by the neural system does not contain direct access to the mechanism of its own production—not as a methodological limitation, but as an architectural principle following from the organization of neural processing itself. The model distinguishes a constitutive level, which fixes the opacity between source architecture and content, and a processual level, which specifies the measurable mechanisms through which this relation is implemented: prestimulus frontoparietal preparation, individual and instantaneous alpha frequency, alpha phase, the temporal binding window, and aperiodic timescales. The empirical basis includes causal data on FEF→V4 influence, effective connectivity of FEF and IPS with visual cortex, the relation of alpha frequency to integration and segregation boundaries, phase modulation of visual temporal integration, tACS effects, and the contribution of aperiodic dynamics to sensory noise and processing timescales. The theory yields eight falsifiable predictions with specific conditions of refutation and adopts the architecture-over-single-marker view, treating the observed heterogeneity of empirical data as an expected consequence of multicomponent temporal parsing.