The Human in the Equation

Something has been on my mind since I woke up this morning. It’s a rather simple question, the kind that feels almost too plain to deserve the weight it carries once you let it breathe: how much of the human experience is entangled into the frameworks we build? Not just our philosophies and moral codes, not just the stories we tell ourselves to make life intelligible, but the formal frameworks too—the mathematics we elevate as neutral, the physics we treat as the cleanest mirror we possess. I keep circling the same suspicion: that even our most disciplined descriptions of reality might still contain the fingerprints of the describer, not as an error, but as an inevitability.

We do not meet the universe raw. We meet it through a particular kind of consciousness, with particular kinds of limitations, with memory and expectation arranged asymmetrically around a moving present. We experience time in one direction, and this is so foundational to us that it feels like reality itself rather than a feature of our interface with reality. We remember the past, not the future. We store records behind us. We anticipate ahead of us. We age one way. Our regret points backward. Our plans point forward. And because we wake up inside this one-way stream, we almost automatically build our formal languages to respect it. We pose problems as “given the initial conditions, what happens next?” We encode evolution as forward update. We treat prediction as the fundamental virtue of a model, which already assumes that the future is the thing to be computed and the past is the thing to be held fixed. It’s difficult to even notice this as a choice, because it does not feel like a choice. It feels like the basic furniture of existence.

But then the thought returns: what if the “one-wayness” we build into our descriptions is not the universe’s ultimate structure, but the structure of our access to the universe? What if time’s arrow is partly a property of the cosmos and partly a property of the kind of creatures who must navigate it? We live as beings who must act, decide, and survive, and action is inseparable from consequence. We are not passive spectators. We are agents embedded in the very thing we’re trying to describe. So perhaps it is unsurprising that our frameworks take on an agent-shaped grammar. Perhaps it is unsurprising that our formalism tends to narrate reality as a sequence.

Causality is where this becomes impossible to ignore. Action preceding consequence. Cause before effect. The intuition is so deep that it doesn’t just appear in our science; it saturates our language, our culture, our sense of meaning, our sense of blame and praise. We speak in “because” and “therefore.” We structure our lives as chains. We explain ourselves by pointing backward: this happened, so I became this; they did that, so I did this. We hold one another accountable by reconstructing origins. We soothe ourselves with stories of why. Even when we claim to be describing the world, we often end up describing the kind of world in which a storyteller like us can remain coherent. And so I find myself asking, again and again, how much of causality is embedded in our frameworks because it genuinely reflects an underlying reality, and how much of it is embedded because it reflects the kind of experience we are forced to have?

It’s tempting to answer too quickly, to dismiss this as a poetic worry that evaporates under precision. After all, science works. The bridge holds. The satellite navigates. The prediction lands. Doesn’t that prove the frameworks are true? But “works” is not the same thing as “is.” Functionality is not metaphysical transparency. A map can be immensely useful without being the territory, and sometimes the most dangerous maps are the ones that work so well at our scale that we forget they have a scale. Newton’s gravity worked. It was not childish. It was not naïve. It was, for a long time, a masterwork—an astonishing compression of experience into law. Yet Einstein arrived and did not merely refine the numbers; he abolished a picture. Gravity was no longer a force reaching across space like an invisible hand. It became geometry. Curvature. A different kind of explanation that made the old intuition feel, in retrospect, like a story we told because it matched the way we move through the world as embodied objects. Newton was not “wrong” in the way a mistake is wrong; he was incomplete in the way a local truth is incomplete. His framework didn’t fail because it was irrational. It failed because the universe demanded a deeper language.

Quantum mechanics did something even more unsettling, not because it gave us strange results, but because it forced us to confront the boundary between “what is” and “what is accessible.” It refused to let the observer remain a ghost outside the system. It made measurement into something with teeth. It made prediction probabilistic in a way that was not merely about ignorance, but about the structure of what can be jointly known. It made the act of extracting knowledge part of the story, and this is precisely the kind of place where human experience can leak into the formal. Not as bias in the childish sense, but as the unavoidable fact that our theories are written from within the universe by parts of the universe. We are the universe modelling itself, with instruments in our hands and metaphors in our minds.

So when I look at our frameworks today, I can’t help but wonder how many of their “obvious” assumptions are obvious only because they are ours. How many of the pillars we treat as fundamental are simply the pillars that support a human way of knowing? We write physics as if the world is a sequence of updates because we are sequence-bound. We privilege initial conditions because we can set them. We orient our experiments around interventions because we are organisms that intervene. We speak of causes producing effects because our lives are stitched together by doing and undergoing. Even our mathematical aesthetics—our love of clean symmetry, our insistence on elegance—may be less a discovery of nature’s preferences and more a mirror of our own longing for compressibility, for patterns that can be held in a mind without breaking it.

None of this means causality is “fake.” It means causality may be layered. There is the causality of everyday life, the causality of narrative, the causality of moral accounting. There is also the causality of physics, which often has less to do with metaphysical pushing and more to do with constraint—what can depend on what, what can influence what without contradiction, what can be signalled, what can be recorded. Those are different ideas wearing the same name. When we say “cause,” sometimes we mean the world is fundamentally a domino line, each event striking the next. Sometimes we mean something more austere: that the universe has a structure that permits certain correlations and forbids others, that information cannot propagate arbitrarily, that records have an orientation because the conditions that create stable records are not symmetric. The confusion begins when we slide between these meanings without noticing, when the warmth of the human narrative sneaks into the coldness of the formal claim.

And then there is the further possibility that unsettles me most: that our deepest mistake might not be in any particular equation, but in the posture we adopt when we think about equations. We imagine time as something that flows, and we imagine reality as something that becomes, frame by frame, like a film being projected. But there are ways of thinking—already present inside our own mathematics—that do not require that picture. There are formalisms that treat histories as wholes, not merely as present moments pushed forward. There are perspectives in which what we call “cause and effect” is not the engine, but the way a local mind reads the structure as it moves through it. In that light, our experienced causality could be less a fundamental property and more an emergent interface, the grammar of consequence that arises when a memory-bearing creature navigates a world where the past leaves stable traces and the future does not. The arrow might be real, but real the way “up” is real—true within a frame, indispensable within a context, not necessarily written into the universe as an absolute.

This is why the question won’t leave me. Because it is not a question that science defeats; it is a question that science intensifies. Every major revolution in physics is also a revolution in humility. Einstein did not merely improve prediction; he dethroned an intuition that felt indistinguishable from reality. Quantum mechanics did not merely complicate the picture; it made “picture” itself suspect, because it exposed how deeply the act of observation, the structure of knowledge, and the conditions of measurement shape what can be meaningfully said. And if those revolutions taught us anything, it is that the frameworks we trust most are often the ones we have grown least able to see as frameworks.

So I keep returning to the thought that started the morning: perhaps much of what we formalise is not reality in its fullness, but reality as it appears under the constraints of human experience. Perhaps our frameworks are not mirrors but lenses—powerful, disciplined, self-correcting lenses, yet lenses nonetheless. They refract. They select. They compress. They privilege what we can test, what we can record, what we can repeat, what we can communicate. They turn the vastness into something legible, and in doing so they may also turn the universe into something slightly more human than it is.

But I don’t take this as a reason for despair. I take it as a reason for precision of a different kind: not just precision in calculation, but precision in self-awareness. To ask, whenever a concept feels too obvious, what part of it is a property of the world and what part of it is a property of the mind encountering the world. To notice how causality sits not only in our physics but in our grammar, our ethics, our sense of self. To notice how time’s direction sits not only in entropy but in memory, not only in cosmology but in grief and longing. To admit that we may be describing, with remarkable success, not the universe in some final sense, but the universe as it becomes knowable to creatures like us.

And maybe that is the honest endpoint of the thought. Not that our frameworks are illusions, but that they are achievements with boundaries. Not that causality is mere fiction, but that “cause” may contain more than one layer of meaning, some of it structural and some of it human. Not that reality is inaccessible, but that access has a shape, and the shape leaves its imprint on what is accessed. The human is in the equation, whether we want it there or not, because the equation is written from inside the very thing it tries to describe.

The question is not whether we can remove ourselves entirely. The question is whether we can learn to see where we are already present—and what new physics might become possible once those hidden assumptions are finally visible.