On the Limits of Sense-Making
Humans are very good at making sense of things. When faced with uncertainty or incomplete information, we naturally form explanations that help us understand what is happening and decide what to do next. Much of science, philosophy, and everyday reasoning is built around improving this ability—making our explanations more accurate, more reliable, and less prone to error.
Most discussions about sense-making focus on where it goes wrong. We talk about bias, faulty reasoning, bad data, or misleading stories. The usual assumption is that the sense-making process itself is basically sound, but imperfect. If we correct the mistakes, we expect better outcomes.
This essay questions that assumption. The deeper problem may not be the mistakes sense-making produces, but the limits built into the process itself.
Two Different Kinds of Error
It helps to separate two layers of sense-making.
The first layer involves errors within the process. These include things like confirmation bias, emotional reasoning, or drawing conclusions too quickly. These errors affect the results we reach.
The second layer is more fundamental. It involves constraints built into the process of sense-making itself. These constraints shape what kinds of explanations we are capable of forming in the first place. They limit the space of possible thoughts before reasoning even begins.
Fixing errors at the first layer does not change the second. Better reasoning inside a fixed framework does not expand what the framework allows us to think.
Hidden Constraints in How We Think
The constraints discussed here are not beliefs we consciously hold. They are not rules we decide to follow. Instead, they operate in the background as conditions for what feels understandable, reasonable, or even thinkable.
Because they work so well in everyday life, we usually don’t notice them at all. They don’t appear as assumptions. They simply define what counts as an explanation.
As long as these constraints continue to work, they remain invisible.
Known Limits vs. Unknown Ones
Some limits on human thinking have already been identified. Once a constraint can be clearly named and examined, it loses some of its power. Even if it still influences us, it is no longer completely hidden.
But this also means that the most important constraints may be the ones we cannot yet name. If we can clearly point to a limitation, then in some sense we have already stepped outside it.
This essay is concerned with the limits that remain unseen because they have never failed.
Why Failure Matters
If these deep constraints are invisible when they work, how could we ever discover them?
The answer seems to be: only when they break.
As long as a way of thinking continues to explain events successfully, there is no reason to question it. Success hides structure. Failure reveals it.
In this sense, failure is not just a mistake. It is a signal that the underlying framework itself may no longer apply.
When Intuition Stopped Working
A clear example of this comes from physics.
For a long time, people assumed that a true description of reality must make intuitive sense. If a theory contradicted common expectations about how the world behaves, it was assumed to be wrong.
This assumption worked extremely well—until it didn’t.
Quantum mechanics produced predictions that were accurate but deeply unintuitive. Reality no longer behaved in ways that matched everyday understanding. Physicists were forced to accept theories they could calculate with, but not fully picture or explain in familiar terms.
The phrase “shut up and calculate” captured a hard lesson: intuition was no longer a reliable guide to truth. A hidden constraint had failed.
Thoughts That Cannot Yet Exist
This leads to an important idea.
As long as a deep constraint remains in place, certain thoughts cannot be formed at all. This is not because we lack information or intelligence. It is because the mental tools needed to form those thoughts do not yet exist.
Before intuition failed in physics, non-intuitive theories were not just unlikely—they were effectively unthinkable. Only after the constraint broke did a new kind of explanation become possible.
This suggests that progress is not always gradual. Sometimes it requires a break that opens an entirely new space of thought.
Stuck Problems and “Negative Space”
If deep constraints reveal themselves through failure, where might we see signs of them today?
One place is in problems that remain stubbornly unsolved, despite long effort and many approaches. When progress repeatedly stalls, it may not be due to lack of effort or data. It may be because the problem is being approached using the wrong kind of thinking.
In this view, long-standing mysteries are not just unsolved questions. They may be signs that our current sense-making tools are mismatched to the task.
Can These Limits Be Found on Purpose?
This raises a difficult question: can we deliberately search for these hidden constraints?
Maybe not.
Trying to find a limit using the very thinking shaped by that limit may be impossible. Any attempt to step outside the framework risks pulling the framework along with it.
If that is true, then these constraints are not discovered by careful analysis alone. They are revealed only when reality forces the issue—when our explanations stop working.
Sense-Making as a Temporary Interface
Taken together, this suggests a different way to think about sense-making.
Rather than a clear window onto reality, sense-making may be more like a temporary interface—something that works well within certain conditions, but not everywhere. Its success does not guarantee completeness.
Progress, then, may require letting go of the expectation that reality must always make sense to us in familiar ways. What lies beyond our current limits may not feel like understanding at all.
But it may still be closer to the truth.
