Neuroscience has not been kind to the concept of free will. In recent years, the field has given us a picture of the conscious mind that isn’t very flattering—it often looks to be quite an underachiever compared to the unconscious mind, and it’s also disturbingly willing to take credit for work it didn’t do.
Articles by Neal Soldofsky
The Game of Life
In an elite UCSC lab, one group of computer scientists strives for hyperadvanced gaming software that can duplicate the human experience, while another puzzles over how to keep the tools of a powerful new medium accessible to all.
The Santa Cruz Video Game Revolution
A modern top-tier video game takes years to make, represents the work of hundreds and will cost tens of millions of dollars to develop—and that’s before any money goes into marketing it. If that game fails, it could very well mean the end for the studio that produced it. This is not an environment that is well suited to wild experimentation. There is innovation. There is steady growth in sophistication. But very rarely is something genuinely new and risky produced.
