Medical Science Meets Complex Adaptive Systems

Medical science wants linear, isolatable cause-and-effect, with clean variables you can control and measure. But interoception is a complex adaptive system – like weather, like economies, like ecosystems. It has multiple subsystems operating at different speeds, with different priorities, negotiating constantly. You can't isolate one variable and call it "interoceptive ability", any more than you can measure weather simply by wind speed without taking into account temperature or humidity or butterflies wings. Those tools of medical science are fundamentally mismatched to the phenomenon – the phenomenon of us. Researchers aren't doing bad science – not exactly. It's just that they're trying to use the wrong tool, exploring complex adaptive systems with a scalpel designed for linear mechanisms.