“This is a delightful account of one of the deepest and most fascinating explorations going on today.” —Carlo Rovelli 
 
The whole goal of physics is to explain what we observe. For centuries, physicists believed that observations yielded faithful representations of what is out there. But when they began to study the subatomic realm, they found that observation often interferes with what is being observed—that the act of seeing changes what we see. The same is true of cosmology: our view of the universe is distorted by observation bias. And so whether they’re studying particles or galaxies, physicists must first explain consciousness—and for that they must turn to neuroscientists and philosophers of mind.

Neuroscientists have painstakingly built up an understanding of the structure of the brain. Could this help physicists understand the levels of self-organization they observe in other systems? These same physicists, meanwhile, are trying to explain how particles organize themselves into the objects around us. Could their discoveries help explain how neurons produce our conscious experience?

Exploring these questions and more, George Musser tackles the extraordinary interconnections among quantum mechanics, cosmology, human consciousness, and artificial intelligence. Combining vivid descriptive writing with portraits of scientists working on the cutting edge, Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation shows how theories of everything depend on theories of mind—and how they might be one and the same.
 
Contributor Bio(s)
 
George Musser is an award-winning journalist, a contributing editor at Scientific American, a contributing writer at Quanta Magazine, and the author of Spooky Action at a Distance. He was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and has appeared on Today, CNN, NPR, the BBC, and other outlets.