Causes are hard (impossible?)

Take-aways and quotes from Jonah Lehrer’s WIRED article “Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us.”

1. The brain isn’t seeking the literal truth—it just wants a plausible story that doesn’t contradict observation.


2. We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact—it’s a fiction that helps us (misleadingly) make sense of facts.


3. Every cause is just a slippery story, a catchy conjecture, a “lively conception produced by habit.”


4. Causal explanations are oversimplifications. This is what makes them useful—they help us grasp the world at a glance.


5. Our stories about causation are shadowed by all sorts of mental shortcuts, and most of the time, these shortcuts work well enough. But when it comes to reasoning about complex systems—say, the human body—these shortcuts go from being slickly efficient to outright misleading.


6. Causal beliefs are defined by their limitations.


7. While Hume was right that causes are never seen, only inferred, the blunt truth is that we can’t tell the difference.


8. We live in a world in which everything is knotted together, an impregnable tangle of causes and effects. There is a fundamental mismatch between how the world works and how we think about the world.


9. Even when we know everything about everything, we’ll still be telling stories about why it happened. It’s mystery all the way down.