Letter
In discussing the dance between academic philosophy and cognitive science, Gray variously labels “the ordinary sensation of selfhood” as illusion and delusion. What he fails to point out is that to many physicists, much of the stock-in-trade of cognitive science and academic psychology is equally illusory.
However, if we are only prepared to accord the status of truth to the most reductionist accounts of nature, we dismiss the explanatory power of many scientific endeavours that focus on higher-level, complex phenomena. The sensation of selfhood may well be illusory, but to invert Dr Johnson’s refutation of Bishop Berkeley (he kicked a stone, thus “proving” the reality of sensation and existence), selfhood is an illusion that can kick a stone very nicely.
One final point: Gray should perhaps have prefaced his references to philosophers as “Western philosophers”, since the Buddhists have been asserting for millennia that the concept of the self is a complete illusion.
Letter
For me, the conclusive argument, and one to which I have yet to hear a convincing rebuttal, was proposed by the great antipodean philosopher Frederick Dagg, to whit: anyone who thinks he isn’t really here can buy his own beer.
Iron in the brain
I know nothing about ink or paper, but found Nicola Jones’s article illuminating from a related if rather different perspective (14 September, p 38).
Researchers now think that oxygen free radicals generated by metals are important in many biological systems, and are frequently involved in degenerative processes, possibly causing such conditions as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease (26 August 2000, p 36).
The photographs of paper destroyed by ink that accompany your article are of enormous symbolic significance to anybody who knows they are suffering from a degenerative disease caused by free radical reactions, induced by iron or other wayward metals. And although the mechanisms may not be totally analogous, it does beg the question that if iron is doing this to paper, what is it doing over a lifetime to your body?
There could be a connection with Parkinson’s disease. This is a degenerative disease that tends to afflict areas of the brain that are pigmented. The main symptoms of the disease are thus associated with decline of part of the brain called the substantia nigra, which gets its name from its black pigmentation.
The pigmentation is caused by a substance called neuromelanin, which accumulates with age and declines in Parkinson’s disease. The pigment accumulates iron and shields neurons from the metal. The cause of Parkinson’s disease is controversial, but one hypothesis is that it is associated with the release of iron from neuromelanin and other sources and, following this, iron-induced free radical attack.
High-crime precautions
I was disappointed to find such a muddle-minded snipe at South Africans in Feedback (14 September). The assertion that apartheid’s spirit may live on as a minority viewpoint is hardly news 鈥� some of the people who made those laws and voted those white-only governments into power are still alive. Only some of them have changed their views.
But the fact that Johannesburg is a high-crime city and that people of any colour living in formerly white-only neighbourhoods have bars on their windows and electric fences does not prove a link to latter-day apartheid. Nor does the fact that security companies offer a response to alarms, whether these guards are armed or not. To call these “private armies” is just wilful overstatement.
Fearing for one’s safety may be a foreign concept to a person brought up in Britain, but in Johannesburg, ordinary people take what seem to be reasonable precautions to safeguard their possessions and their safety. What has not changed, in fact, is the extremely high crime rate.
Globules at Tunguska
The report by Nicola Jones on yet another theory explaining the 1908 Tunguska event repeats the myth that no material has ever been recovered from the object that made the impact (7 September, p 14).
It is true that some of the material found by the mineralogist A. A. Yavnel’ in Leonid Alekseyevich Kulik’s soil samples, obtained in 1930, proved to be of terrestrial origin. However, the mineralogist O. A. Kirova recovered both magnetite globules and various forms of silicate globules from samples obtained by Kiril Pavlovich Florensky’s expedition in 1958. Such globules are characteristic of the particles produced when meteoroids enter the atmosphere, and there is no reason to doubt their origin.
These results were so significant that a further expedition in 1962 set out to determine the distribution of these particles. The investigation showed that they occur over a fairly well-defined ellipse, with high concentrations between 100 and 200 kilometres to the north-north-west of the epicentre. Florensky suggested that this distribution might be explained by fallout downwind of the high-altitude location of the final explosion.
Lethal laptops
The problem of electronic equipment being a threat to aeroplanes would seem to be much worse than you indicate (14 September, p 10). A suitably modified and programmed device, even in checked luggage, could switch itself on and begin causing the interference the article speaks of. Other than banning electronics altogether what could prevent this?
Suicides stay level
The decline in suicides following the adoption of environmentally friendly components in cars is an example of a well known pattern (7 September, p 24). The classic example in Britain was the switch in fuel from coal gas supplies to North Sea methane, which had a similar effect to that noted by Joshua Mott and colleagues in regard to catalytic converters. My own experience as a psychiatrist suggests that the increasingly widespread adoption of diesel engines in private cars has had a similar effect.
Sadly, the effect doesn’t last. Would-be suicide victims simply switch to other methods. I suspect that Mott and his colleagues will find that overall suicide rates for all methods have changed little.
Life after death
As a teacher of religious education and science, I usually look through New 杏吧原创 for useful material for the science and religion module I teach. But now, with your “Live Later/Live Now” competition (21 September), I have useful material for the death and dying module. Who says science and religion can’t mix?
Letter
I took your quiz, “How Long Do You Have To Go?” (www.newscientist.com/competition/quiz.jsp). Then I filled in the birth information and answers relating to my grandmother. I was told that she died 20 years ago, at the age of 82. This is hilarious: my grandmother is 102 years old.
Wonder worms
It is not quite true that Darwin was the first to recognise the merits of earthworms in 1881 (14 September, p 49). Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789) contains a letter White sent in 1777 to Daines Barrington which outlines all the main points Darwin was to make, even recommending a “good monography” to be written. It had to wait for over 90 years, but when it came, Darwin indeed altered public opinion for good.
Evil landlords
Feedback’s statement that the Great Depression gave birth to the game of Monopoly is not quite correct (21 September). The game was originally patented as The Landlord’s Game, in 1904. See the Oxford History of Board Games by David Parlett for the full story.
Controlling knowledge
In your piece on the effect of 11 September on science, Harold Newby of the British Association for the Advancement of Science is right to say that the public is losing its faith in the Enlightenment belief that growth in knowledge automatically leads to social progress (14 September, p 11).
To quote a clich茅, knowledge is power. Knowledge does not advance evenly on all fronts and all human knowledge cannot fit into a single human brain. So it matters who drives knowledge forward and controls it. Most research is paid for by companies who have profit, not social progress, as their explicit objective. The public quite rightly perceives that most new research is not quite on its side any more.
It is now obvious that more knowledge cannot of itself give us social progress. Newby picks out 11 September as a turning point, but two decades in which human knowledge and the gap between rich and poor have both grown inexorably surely laid the ground.
If scientists want to regain public trust, then we should speak out against the corporate control of science and the way science is used to benefit the rich. Only then might lost faith be regained.
Danger at home
Ian Sample’s article on electronic tags for children (14 September, p 25) contained some telling points, but seemed to me to miss the main one. Statistical evidence, backed up by a great deal of personal testimony, demonstrates that electronic tags would merely allow children to be located by the adults who pose the greatest danger to them 鈥� their parents and other family members.
Every time children are abducted, abused or murdered by people they do not know, the media circus which invariably follows revolves around the false premise that children are safe in their homes and must be protected from “strangers”.
Given that as a child I was frequently hit with considerable force round the head by a close family member, it may only be the fact that I was able to hide from him that has allowed me, thirty-something years later, to have the intellectual capacity to read your magazine and respond to its contents.
A sense of self
Jon Gray is right to point out that much of our activity in the world is the result of non-conscious processing (14 September, p 46). Given that there is no logical link between “Many events do not require conscious processing” and “Consciousness is an illusion”, the really interesting question for cognitive science is “What is consciousness for?”
Perhaps the evolutionary advantage conferred by consciousness isn’t to be found in the realm of cognitive processing, but in feelings and their significance in developing social relations and communication.
I know of no contemporary philosophers who would deny that we have a great deal in common with other animals, including consciousness (I don’t really know if my bees are conscious but I know that my cat is, and I think I know something about the difference I am ascribing). If a self is a subject of consciousness then my cat is a self too. This involves nothing more controversial than suggesting that experiences can’t be separated from the organism experiencing them.
The interesting thing about humans is that their concept of self (which Gray sees as illusory) allows them to contemplate future experiences. If I know that I am about to get into a conflict with other members of my group, I can still ask whether I am likely to feel any of the pain that will probably result, and I can ascribe a similar concern about the outcome to the others.
Self-awareness, far from being an illusion, thus reflects a fundamental knowledge about how things are (a facility that can also be studied through examples of its breakdown, such as in the thought processes of people with schizophrenia). Of course, a world without consciousness and self-awareness might be tidier and simpler to comprehend, but this is not a reason for science or philosophy to wish it away and treat it as on a par with believing in a flat earth.