Confirmation Bias and the Limits of a Useful Word

Peter Wason coined confirmation bias in 1960 — our tendency to favor evidence that already agrees with us. It’s a genuinely useful word. Most of the time.

But there’s a place it stops applying cleanly: when the question isn’t “is my data trustworthy” but “is consciousness itself causal.”

You can’t run a controlled experiment on whether awareness shapes reality from the inside of the very awareness you’re testing.

Some questions sit outside the lab. Not because they’re unrigorous — because the instrument doing the measuring is the same thing being measured.

~ Timothy