Footnote Physicist

 by Steven Gussman Author's Note: This article was originally published to the now-defunct   Areo Magazine on 5/30/23 . What appears below is pulled from a version I archived on 11/7/23 (though I don't believe changes were ever made to this article). C onsciousness is among the greatest outstanding scientific mysteries. We have no direct way of telling whether a given being is conscious and therefore have to rely on basic induction. We know that we ourselves are conscious—as Descartes said, “I think therefore I am”—but to avoid solipsism, we must also reason that other people are conscious as well (that it is a feature of our species), and even that many other animals are conscious (judging by their complex behaviour, and the fact that their minds were generated by the same process of evolution by natural selection that generated our own). Would it be possible to build an artificial human that could fool anyone who met it, but that would nevertheless be a mindless machine wi...

by Steven Gussman         In high school history class, as is often the case with issues of identity in the 21 st century, I was given the impression that a significant front opposed Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy on the grounds that he was religiously Catholic (despite his ultimately winning the election). This was presented as a mere (if somewhat tame) expression of bigotry from a country with an ugly history of such attitudes (not to mention practices and laws). In part, it surely was. It had been argued by some that J.F.K. would take his orders not from the American people, but from a foreign actor in the Pope of the Catholic Church in Rome. Ridiculous, for sure, but in reading through some of America's founding documents, I was met with a piece of philosophical history that left me with a slightly more nuanced opinion of this particular opposition to J.F.K.         The early British-American colonists are often described in ter...

by Steven Gussman           Our genes are ultimately responsible for the existence of our brains (to date, developmental biology is the only process capable of building this complex machine); but the genes clearly build it to be a somewhat (though by no means completely ) plastic processing unit. i And yet this degree of plasticity is itself a heritable, genetically encoded trait— the product of natural selection (which would by definition never be able to produce a genetic leash of zero percent). ii How else would we have evolved from brainless cells, to our simple hardwired ancestors, to the complex behavioral great apes? iii Neurobiologist Leo M. Chalupa points out that, “what's special about brain plasticity... is that the changes are mediated by events that are in some sense adaptive,” (what a fantastic coincidence that would be, if plastic-learning were a genuinely arbitrary process victim to the whims of, “cultural constructs”). iv Let's lo...