Letter
Like many people faced with the problem of consciousness, Blackmore starts by assuming the existence of an independent external material world and then asks: “How do you get from a real magazine composed of atoms and molecules to your experience of seeing it?”
Well, quite. How could you? What is commonly misunderstood is that the so-called external real world, along with the concept of constituent particles, is a model derived from conscious experience. In other words, it’s consciousness, not physical matter, that is the fundamental “stuff” of the Universe. This approach immediately dispenses with the “hard problem” by making mind (consciouness) the essential reality, and matter a construct of mind.
Letter
Blackmore suggests that there is no such thing as a conscious self, because consciousness is an illusion. What is it, then, that has the illusion?
Letter
After reading Blackmore’s article (while washing dishes) I mused that probably, all the waking time, I was thinking about something. When I was thinking about thinking, then I experienced subjective consciousness. Meanwhile the dishes were cleaned effectively, without conscious thought.
Next, making a cup of tea, the revelation occurred to me that at any given time probably a large number of possible fragments of experience are being written to a scratch area of short-term memory. Consider the fragments as nodes in a graph. There is a large number of possible orderings. There may be a mechanism that links, integrates and reads back a sequence, not necessarily time-ordered. This sequence becomes “special”: it is a conscious thought. The rest of the fragments may disappear. I served tea to my partner. There was no milk in it (she always has milk).
I think this corroborates the no-picture-in-our heads view. Our brains don’t do any more than they have to, and often not even that.
Fear of addiction
Being 17 myself, I consider it my duty to act as spokesman for the generation that would be affected first by vaccination against nicotine addiction (22 June, p 4).
Teenagers start smoking for many reasons 鈥� some as an act of rebellion, some as a response to peer pressure 鈥� but the main reason that non-smoking teenagers do not smoke is out of fear of addiction. If you take that fear out of the equation, the result will be more teenage smokers than before. They may not become addicted, which may seem a positive approach to smoking, but let’s not forget that smoking promotes poor health with or without nicotine.
Dearth of dark matter
Michael Rowan-Robinson questions the widely held view that there is not enough dark matter to make the Universe flat (1 June, p 38) by casting doubt on the evidence from galaxy clustering scale factors.
But there are several other techniques for determining the amount of dark matter, such as cluster X-ray emission, the geometry of gravitational lenses and dynamic interactions within galactic groups.
These are all separate methods. They share little or nothing in common, and they all show that there is only 20 to 30 per cent of the matter needed to make the Universe flat.
Entangled trains
Feedback laughs at the warning on a toy train, “Entanglement possible” (29 June).
Some years ago, my then three-year-old daughter was playing with her battery-powered Brio locomotive and was so absorbed in this activity that she did not realise that her blond locks were laid across the rails. I would like to report that entanglement occurred, and continued until the locomotive had climbed the length of her hair to her scalp before she managed to isolate the power source.
Sex induces labour
Prompted by Rebecca Rose’s letter on sex and labour (11 May, p 57) and your recent report on the benefits of semen (29 June, p 5), I wanted to clear up the point on old wives’ tales about sex inducing labour.
Many hospitals use a synthetic form of the prostaglandin found in semen to induce labour if women are past their delivery date. This is administered via a drip into the woman over a period of a few hours.
So, far from being an old wives’ tale, it is a proven fact that sex (or rather the male product of it) can induce labour. However, having been pregnant myself, I do accept the point about the physical difficulty of performing this act when you are the size of a small country.
The other Milne
Robert Gifkins asks whether the work of E. A. Milne, who is my father, has been forgotten (8 June, p 53).
Milne had a great capacity for original, unorthodox thought, and beyond his two timescales and the implication that “constants” of nature may vary, he did pioneering work in astrophysics, and during the world wars in ballistics.
As I have discovered writing his biography, his output was prodigious and diverse, from his interpretation of stellar spectra to his anticipation of measuring distances by radar.
Allergic to partner
Thank you for your article on the irritation caused by allergies such as hay fever (22 June, p 16). But you failed to mention the irritation caused by a partner snuffling and sneezing 24 hours a day.
For the record
鈥� A sentence in our feature on infrasound got mangled in the editing process (15 June, p 36, 3rd column, 3rd paragraph). It should have read: “Lobel questions whether the sound is louder than any other whale noise, because he’s heard of whale song being detected at that distance and farther.”
Dream time
Reading your article on consciousness coincided with the need to explain to my eight-year-old daughter the nature of time in dreams (22 June, p 26). The fact that dreams can often apparently anticipate some outside event, such as a telephone ringing, leads inescapably to the conclusion that the apparent flow of time in at least some dreams is actually constructed in reverse 鈥� similar to the way that Susan Blackmore suggests our “grand illusion” of consciousness is created outside of the time stream.
I suggest that we wake up from sleep with some residual, snapshot-style, emotional and perceptual state which we then attempt to resolve as a “real” experience when restarting consciousness. We convert the perceptual state into a final scene, but as this inevitably does not fit the emotional and short-term memory state, we construct memories of successive earlier scenes with decreasing clarity to complete the image.
This can even lead to the illusion of a recurrent dream, where an over-strong memory link suggests that the scene has been seen several times before. In fact we dream the memory of the repetition as well as the dream itself.
Doctor knows best?
I have some sympathy with Steve Fuller when it comes to evidence-based policy making (22 June, p 46). His sideswipe at evidence-based medicine (EBM) is a bit wide of the mark, however.
EBM practitioners are well aware that they are dealing in probabilities rather than “facts”. Evaluations of the studies that comprise the evidence go to great lengths to ensure that the assumptions and limitations of study findings are recognised.
Equally, clinicians are hopefully aware that even the best evidence only tells them what is most likely to work for most patients most of the time. It does not prevent them from relying on their experience or knowledge of individual patients when making judgements about what is appropriate for them. A summary of the best available evidence is only another tool for practising clinicians to use. It is evidence-based, not evidence-directed, medicine.
Ultimately, if someone is proposing to poke around in your innards or fill you full of a cocktail of potentially toxic chemicals would you rather they considered the best available evidence of what is likely to work, or took the approach of Julietta Patnick (“Virtuous nature”), who would apparently prefer that certain research was not done because doctors “know” what works. At one time doctors “knew” that bleeding was the answer to many ills, or that diseases like malaria or yellow fever were caused by a miasma of some form in the air. It didn’t help many of their patients, though.
Terror on both sides
I take no exception to your article on Palestinian life in the occupied territories (11 May, p 40). It does, as you say in replying to a letter on 22 June (p 52), show the pressures that lead people to resort to terrorism.
But I do take exception to your claim that Israel is not carrying out acts of terrorism. Israel is carrying out acts of terrorism 鈥� that is, acts intended to terrorise a population. Its military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, its attacks on schools and ambulances and its constant resort to violence to enforce its will are intended to intimidate, to terrorise, the Palestinians. Even those demonstrations of military power that don’t kill, such as low-level flights by Israeli fighters, can have no other purpose.
Both sides are practising terrorism. And both are suffering from it. And by its suffering, each side is confirmed in its resolution to continue practising terrorism.
But there is a difference. The Israeli state uses its colossal firepower against the Palestinian people, their government and their infrastructure. The violent response comes from non-state political groups. If Hamas and Islamic Jihad are guilty, then so is the government of Israel.
In saying that Israel was not carrying out acts of terrorism we took the common definition of terrorism as acts intended to kill civilians in order to spread terror. The definition above goes beyond this.
This correspondence is now closed 鈥� Ed.
Mercury in whales
As your editorial notes, “the health of fish stocks is not exactly box-office material” (8 June, p 3). But the health of people is, and so it seems are stories related to whaling. It is therefore particularly important that a story combining the two should get it right. Unfortunately, Andy Coghlan’s story in the same edition concerning mercury levels in liver samples from dolphins (p 17) gets it terribly wrong and, by so doing, misinforms the public on a contentious issue.
High levels of mercury found in the liver and other tissues of a small number of samples of dolphins does not equate to high levels of mercury or anything else in the meat, blubber or organs of baleen whales that would be hunted by Japan in the Antarctic or western North Pacific if commercial whaling on abundant stocks were resumed. Yet this is exactly the implication of Coghlan’s article together with its subtitle, photograph and photograph caption.
Relating the consumption of whalemeat from these areas to warnings of poisoning unborn children and comparisons to the tragic events that occurred 40 to 50 years ago in Minamata Bay amounts to nothing less than scaremongering.
All whalemeat on the Japanese market derived from Japan’s whale research programmes in the North Pacific and Antarctic is tested, and all such products that enter the market are safe according to standards of the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
Whaling has been made an emotional issue by groups that intentionally continue their campaigns of misinformation in order to raise huge amounts of money from the public. Pressure from these groups is also responsible for the politicisation of the International Whaling Commission and its dysfunctional nature. Articles like Coghlan’s are part of this problem.
It’s true that mercury levels are generally much lower among plankton-eating baleen whales. However, one of the species Japan wants to resume catching is the sperm whale, a toothed whale. Last year the Institute of Cetacean Research could not sell sperm whale products from its “scientific” catch because mercury concentrations in the red meat were found to be more than four times above safety limits. In addition, DNA tests have shown that meat from dolphins and toothed whales 鈥� the species in which the highest levels of mercury have been found 鈥� is frequently sold in Japan as baleen whale meat from the “scientific” catches 鈥� Ed.