Louisville Process Theology Network

Limits of our Knowledge

Like everyone else, "scientists rely heavily on their vision to construct and interact with reality. So, they are susceptible to believing that what they see is the whole picture, even when it’s not.

Take chronic back pain. The common treatment used be to do nothing, a slow but effective palliative. Then magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) revealed that many sufferers has badly degenerated discs, and patients underwent surgery to have them removed.

Researchers later discovered that the seemingly obvious causal relationship did not hold up. Some people with injured discs never experienced pain. Now, doctors are advised to skip the MRI because the additional information doesn’t clarify the cause.

Cases like these have multiplied across the medical word. ... It appears that protocols are weak in the face of science’s deep conviction that that ‘the so-called problem of causation can be cured by more information.’

(As it turns out,) searching for correlations is a poor way to go about understanding the complex systems that scientists seek to demystify. … Scientists need to be more mindful of how the system they’re studying interacts with other systems. Too many times we think we understand how something works, but we don’t....

We don’t recognize the limits of our knowledge."

From "Trials and Errors" by Jonah Lerner in "Wired", Jan., 2012