Except, as medicine has discovered over and over again, many of those things are not actually true if you get a large enough sample size. And there are plenty of historical examples of behavior that, frankly, no one is going to be able to rationalize today, such as monks meditating themselves to death sealed inside their own tombs.

To pick an example - human brain size:

1 in 50 babies have brains that develop noticeably too large for the curve. Digging into it has identified a gene that regulates Brain sizes. There are of course many variations and mutations of that gene.
[https://news.weill.cornell.edu/news/2014/04/single-gene-muta...]

And current human brain sizes already vary greatly, from (recorded) sizes of 61-l to 122+ cubic cm. [https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/634481-la...].

To pick another example you gave - brain stem injury.

[https://www.brainandspinalcord.org/brain-stem/]

Can someone survive on their own, right now with severe spinal cord trauma? No.

But we can keep their body alive, and they can do basic communication with technical means. They’re locked in, but they aren’t cut off anymore.

Even in the past, people could survive for some time with help with severe and traumatic brain stem damage. I personally know someone who suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke in her brain stem over a decade ago, was in a coma for months, and recovered. Today the only difference you can see is her fine motor control isn’t as good.

It wasn’t an iron rod, but I doubt it will be much longer before we can help the body recover from something like that too. A century ago, she would definitely have just been dead.

Another example: 24 fps is also not an absolute hard limit or minimum anything.

It’s a picked point where almost everyone can see simulated motion without having to work too hard (on the producer or consumer sides), it’s economical to produce things in (a major problem back in the day when it was all literal film), etc.

It is very noticeably not lifelike to almost everyone. Which is fine for its purpose. People can see motion at far lower frame rates (a flip book being a trivial example), and can see that the motion is artificial at far higher frame rates - picking out that a ‘bad’ frame was stuck into a higher rate feed for instance, or that it’s artificial and not real even in immersive environments (though that is much trickier to create a real test due to technical limitations now, everything we can do is pretty obviously fake to most humans).

Like the specified ranges of human hearing [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range], or the human ‘Normal’ body temperature [https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/01/human-body-te...] or a number of other things - they are generally agreed upon ‘good enough’ values. Useful approximations, not reality.

This is discoverable with sample sizes of hundreds, at most, and I expect you’ve personally experienced this too.

A friend who hears the sound that no one else can hear in a piece of electronics, for instance.

The further from the median we get, the rarer the deviations get of course. And near as we can tell, the probability of faster than light travel, or as you note a copper brainstem, or mind control is zero. At least unless we have evidence it isn’t. If there was some evolutionary advantage and some path via physics to do it (so, still zero odds on the mind control thing).

But the deviations in people in reality are far, far wider than you are stating or implying.

Even your note on the human genome reinforces this. We did not, and could not, and still can’t, sequence every humans genome in any deterministic way. Even the human genome sequencing we have done has just gone to show that it isn’t really very useful or what we thought it was.

Just to name a few factors - Epigenetics, methylation, and a host of other things have made it really clear that what we thought was ‘the story’ is really not. But it is part of it. And that is without even going into Chimeras, which we’ve found more and more of.

What you’re describing is the ‘all the hard problems in physics are solved’ fallacy.

Life is not that easy, for better or worse.

It can be useful to think it is though when we have something to do though.