Lenses

Last Updated on August 20, 2026 by Rob Cashman

As the Missing Variables website evolves, it has important to create a CATEGORY ROADMAP so that readers can understand how each article or paper fits into the larger structure.

In each article, we will be asking,

“What fundamental problem is the article investigating?”

Thus, the categories we are using will reflect the site’s major philosophical territories.

CATEGORY #1. PERCEPTION & OBSERVATION

QUESTION: What can we actually know from what we observe?

Articles in the PERCEPTION & OBSERVATION category will discuss the relationship between:

  • the observer
  • the observed
  • sensory systems
  • measurement
  • perspective
  • representation
  • what information reaches us
  • what information does not

Current articles:

What Light Reveals About Objects We Assume We Are Observing (8/13/2026)

Why Do Monsters Come Out at Night? The Missing Variable Is Vision (8/10/2026)

Where we are going with this in our articles:

  • The observer is part of the observation
  • What an instrument cannot detect
  • Whether absence of evidence is sometimes absence of sensory access
  • The difference between an object and the information available about an object
  • Measurement as filtration

Tags from articles:

  • observation
  • observer
  • perception
  • vision
  • light
  • color
  • sensory systems
  • measurement
  • representation
  • information
  • perspective

Lenses

  • Physics
  • Optics
  • Neuroscience
  • Biology
  • Epistemology

CATEGORY #2 – CAUSALITY, TIME, & DURATION

QUESTION: How do events, processes, and meaning relate across time?

Articles in the CAUSALITY, TIME, & DURATION category ask questions about:

  • cause and effect
  • temporal direction
  • whether the future changes the meaning of the past
  • homeostasis
  • teleology
  • feedback
  • irreversible processes

Current articles

Homeostasis, Causality, and the Direction of Time (8/4/2026)

Does the Future Determine the Meaning of the Past? (PENDING)

Tags

  • causality
  • time
  • past
  • future
  • direction of time
  • homeostasis
  • feedback
  • teleology
  • entropy
  • irreversible processes

Lenses

  • Chassidus
  • Physics
  • Thermodynamics
  • Biology
  • Systems Theory
  • Philosophy

CATEGORY #3 – SYSTEMS, EMERGENCE, & AGENCY

QUESTION: How do larger structures produce behavior that cannot be understood solely from their parts?

Articles in the SYSTEMS, EMERGENCE, & AGENCY category investigate the possibility that the meaningful “actor” is not always the individual component.

Questions here include:

  • What counts as an actor?
  • Can a system possess agency-like properties?
  • How do incentives emerge from structures?
  • How do individual choices become constrained by system architecture?
  • When does optimization of one component damage the whole?

Current articles

When Systems Shape Choice: The Architecture of Inevitability (8/5/2026)

The Inherent Dangers of Optimizing Complex Systems (8/9/2026)

Tags

  • systems
  • complex systems
  • emergence
  • optimization
  • agency
  • incentives
  • feedback loops
  • system-level actors
  • unintended consequences
  • local optimization
  • global optimization
  • adaptation

Lenses

  • Systems Theory
  • Complexity Science
  • Game Theory
  • Biology
  • Economics
  • Evolutionary Theory

CATEGORY #4 – BOUNDARIES, SCALE, & PERSPECTIVE

QUESTION: Where do the things we study begin and end, and how does perspective change what appears to be true?

While I do not yet have articles written that apply to the BOUNDARIES, SCALE, & PERSPECTIVE category, I do have articles that I am already working on which would apply to this category.

Much of our thinking involves asking questions such as:

  • Where did we decide that the thing begins?
  • Where did we decide that the system ends?
  • At what scale does the phenomenon change?
  • Are we mistaking a boundary in our model for a boundary in reality?

For Example:

  • Is an organism an individual or an ecosystem?
  • Is an actor an individual person or a larger system?
  • Does a phenomenon look causal at one scale and emergent at another?
  • Where does an object actually “end”?
  • Is the boundary between observer and observed as clear as we assume?

Tags

  • boundaries
  • scale
  • perspective
  • levels of analysis
  • emergence
  • observer
  • abstraction
  • reductionism

Lenses

  • Systems Theory
  • Physics
  • Biology
  • Complexity Science
  • Philosophy

CATEGORY #5 – MEANING, INTERPRETATION, & CONTEXT

Articles in the MEANING, INTERPRETATION, & CONTEXT category would concern the fact that information may not possess the same meaning independent of:

  • time
  • context
  • subsequent events
  • the system in which it is embedded
  • the observer interpreting it

For example, our upcoming article, “Does the Future Determine the Meaning of the Past?” (PENDING*) could become a big part of this category.

* NOTE: For the moment, I am still researching whether limiting the article to merely “determining the meaning” (which isn’t much of an idea) can be expanded to the actual topic I am trying to write about. But for the moment, I haven’t backed up the concepts yet with scientific principles which are known and could be accurately applied to document that such a concept is possible and already demonstrated by science.

The goal is for this category to be exploring:

  • retrospective meaning
  • context-dependent information
  • interpretation
  • narrative
  • teleology
  • whether meaning (or perhaps something more) can propagate backward without running into physical causation propagating backward

This idea is interesting because one of the philosophical moves I can imagine Missing Variables making is:

Perhaps we sometimes confuse a change in meaning with a change in causality.

We know so little about time. What we do observe is that the future does not physically ’cause’ the past. We can establish that the future may retroactively shape or determine what the past meant, but this second point is not necessarily worthy of an article.

Tags

  • teleology (having its source in, but to be distinguished from: Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of ‘teleological suspension of the ethical.’)
  • meaning
  • interpretation
  • context
  • information
  • past
  • future
  • narrative

CATEGORY #6 – ASSUMPTIONS & MISSING VARIABLES

QUESTION: What might our models, questions, and conclusions be failing to account for?

The ASSUMPTIONS & MISSING VARIABLES category is really the “philosophical heart” of our entire website.

Articles in this category explore situations in which our conclusions may be internally logical but possibly incorrecgt because:

  • a variable was omitted
  • an assumption was invisible
  • the model excluded part of reality
  • the observer’s framework predetermined the possible answers
  • a boundary was arbitrarily drawn

This category might end up including articles from any or all of the scientific fields.

For example:

An article about light might primarily belong to Perception & Observation, but it is also deeply connected to Assumptions & Missing Variables.

Tags

  • missing variables
  • assumptions
  • hidden assumptions
  • model limitations
  • uncertainty
  • unknowns
  • incomplete information
  • framing
  • abstraction
  • reductionism

CATEGORY #7 – “BEYOND THE HORIZON”

a.k.a. The Horizon of the Unknown

This is where we would like to go with the articles on this website.

QUESTION: What lies beyond the current limits of observation, knowledge, and conceptualization?

Articles in the BEYOND THE HORIZON category will not only be stating “Here is what we know,” or “Here is what we do not know.” Rather, we will be asking:

“What might exist beyond the boundary of questions our current conceptual system is capable of asking?”

A Horizon implies a limit of visibility. It is not a void; something might exist beyond it.

The limitation may belong to the observer rather than to the structure of reality.

Our articles will be leading us towards a boundary beyond which our present instruments, concepts, assumptions, or perspectives cannot yet see.

Articles in the BEYOND THE HORIZON category would explicitly examine the limits of:

  • knowledge
  • scientific models
  • measurement
  • conceptual frameworks
  • language
  • observation

Possible tags:

  • scientific assumptions
  • unknown
  • unknowable
  • horizon
  • limits of knowledge
  • epistemic limits
  • model boundaries
  • conceptual limits
  • paradigm

Lenses

Potentially almost everything. Missing Variables and Assumptions is not a specific scientific discipline. It is not even a specific philosophy. It is our methodological posture.

In each of these categories, we will be looking to do three things:

  1. Identifying a fundamental question.
  2. Following the concepts that emerge from it.
  3. Looking through multiple lenses to see what any one lens might miss.

Every system of inquiry necessarily observes reality through a particular set of conceptual instruments. Those instruments make certain things visible while potentially rendering other things invisible. The question is whether bringing fundamentally different lenses into conversation can reveal assumptions or variables that remain hidden when we look through only one.

The Missing Variable may sometimes be a quantity.

But it may also be:

  • a hidden assumption,
  • an incorrectly drawn boundary,
  • an inappropriate scale of analysis,
  • an unnoticed observer effect,
  • a mistaken definition of the system,
  • an excluded causal relationship,
  • or even a question that our existing conceptual framework has not made it possible for us to ask yet.

That last category is where Beyond the Horizon could eventually become the philosophical frontier of the entire project.