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           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...

by Steven Gussman           In the field of biology, what is commonly taken as, “environmental causation,” is more-or-less mythical. i All explanations of life terminate in genetic evolution with the, “environment,” playing a different role than almost anyone means by their mention of it. "Biology" is the scientific study of life; "genetics" is the scientific study of the unit of hereditary information which encodes the blueprint of life (and also plays the role of the unit of selection in evolutionary theory). "Determinism" is the philosophical idea that the world is explicable through tight chains of cause and effect with no room for fundamental noise (though ample room for practical noise). Post -Darwin, it's perverse that, "adaptationists," have sometimes been considered something of a disputed school of thought within evolutionary biology (though like, “biological/genetic determinism,” this is mostly achieved through a straw-man th...