Copyright

David H. Silver

Published On

2026-04-08

Language

  • English

Print Length

10 pages

THEMA

  • PH
  • PHQ
  • PHR
  • PDZ

BISAC

  • SCI055000
  • SCI015000
  • SCI057000
  • SCI061000
  • SCI075000
  • SCI034000

Keywords

  • Scientific storytelling
  • Conceptual physics
  • Modern physics explained
  • Relativity and quantum mechanics
  • Mathematics in science
  • Deep science for general readers

A Freely Wilful Ignorance

Chapter of: Beyond Popular Science

Milligrams of propofol erase consciousness in seconds. Fatal familial insomnia prevents its cessation for months until death. While we can reliably toggle awareness, no unified mechanism explains why subjectivity vanishes. Consciousness cannot be reduced to neural correlates or fit by classifiers. Any attempt to locate its origin in physical mechanisms presupposes the very phenomenon under study. Free will and physics appear incompatible, but the standoff is asymmetric: agency is the lived fact that makes physics construction possible. Consciousness occupies the apex of a revision hierarchy where, in any conflict with lower-level descriptions, the knower must prevail.

Contributors

David H. Silver

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3071-304X

David H. Silver is an industrial researcher whose career bridges computer vision, computational biology, and science communication. He studied mathematics, computer science, and biology at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology as a Rothschild Scholar, and was awarded a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship for his doctoral work in computational biology at Cambridge, UK. Silver’s peer-reviewed publications span multiple domains: computational biology in Nature and PNAS; computer vision systems in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence; medical AI in Human Reproduction and MIDL; and entertainment analysis in PLoS One. He holds over a dozen patents in depth sensing, medical imaging, and generative AI. His industry positions include Algorithm Engineer at Intel Corporation, ML Researcher at Apple, and CTO/co-founder roles at several technology startups. Silver maintains academic collaborations with researchers worldwide and serves as a peer reviewer for Image and Vision Computing and PNAS.