Road charge cards
Current proposals on road tools have potential problems, ranging from the “big brother” aspect of the authorities knowing were we are at all times, the vast amount of data being transmitted and processed, the reliance on satellite technology which is not under our control and the scale of the exercise before even a realistic trial could be undertaken (9 December 2006, p 29).
One alternative proposal is as follows: all cars would be fitted with a receiver rather than a transmitter. The receiver would get information about the region the vehicle was in from roadside transmitters, at locations that approximate the position of speed restrictions etc. The car would know in simple code form the speed limit, the mileage charge, parking restriction etc
All cars would be fitted with a card reader, using existing smart card technology 鈥� already have these.
All cars would have an on-board computer (many have several already) able to use the information provided by the reader, the receiver and on-board sensors such as the speedometer.
The card would have to be validated as belonging to a person qualified to drive. It would replace the current driving licence.
The card would provide a way of recording that the car was taxed, insured and had passed safety and emissions inspections.
Presenting the card to the reader would prevent the car from starting unless all the necessary conditions were met.
While the car was in use the computer would calculate any charges due, write to the card details of the mileage charge, speeding offences etc and debit the card accordingly. There would be some form of display to inform the driver of his current situation.
On stopping, the car would only start again if the card was still valid and in credit, or one or two starts could be allowed with an invalid card. All service stations would have a card centre allowing drivers to put credit on their cards. Data on speeding offences would be downloaded for further attention…
Such a scheme could be introduced gradually. To start with, no external signals would be necessary to enforce the maximum speed limit and a charge to penalise high fuel consumption could also be made without external signals.
Problematic pool
Feedback discusses a daily water saving of 62 million litres or 62,000 cubic metres, measured in Olympic swimming pools (20 January). An 8-lane, 25-metre wide Olympic pool stretching 4000 kilometres from Melbourne to Darwin would have a surface area of about 100 million square metres (although Olympic pools are strictly only 50 m long so this is really 80,000 Olympic pools end to end). Hence the depth of water would be 0.62 millimetres.
Evaporation rates mapped by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology show that over roughly three-quarters of its length this pool would lose close to 10 mm of water per day. So, while very thin swimmers might get out of Melbourne, parts of the pool would be completely dry about an hour and a half after it was filled. The problem could be mitigated by holding the race in winter, at night or when it’s raining.
Simulation software
Nick Bostrum’s proposal that we are all living inside a computer simulation reminded me of a contribution I made to the sci.physics internet newsgroup some ten or fifteen years ago (18 November 2006, p 38). I pointed out that the hypothesis that this universe was a computer simulation would explain some otherwise puzzling aspects.
The speed of light: it is finite in order to reduce the total calculation load and to prevent overflow in some calculations. It is constant in all reference frames because it is a pre-defined constant in the code, applied uniformly to all simulated events.
The uncertainty principle: the variables from which position and momentum are calculated have finite precision; the more precise the position, the less precision is available for momentum and vice-versa.
The Big Bang: initialising the simulation.
Inflation: obtaining memory from the operating system and initialising it.
Black holes: this is a bug. Close to the event horizon values become denormalised and weird things happen because of the loss of precision.
At the event horizon the calculations underflow and no further calculation can take place. They can’t be bothered fixing the bug and run the simulation with interrupt-on-underflow disabled.
Hawking radiation: subtracting values very close in magnitude; all that’s left is random rounding errors.
Clairvoyance: the job gets checkpointed every so often and the state of the simulation dumped to tape. The simulation is allowed to run on for a while. When the checkpointed state is restored it is not restored completely and some memory locations contain information from after the checkpoint.
Miracles: they are using the debugger to change things.
Free will
I am neither a professional scientist nor philosopher but even so I was disappointed by the lax arguments and trite examples in John Searle’s “Between a rock and a hard place” (13 January, p 48). For example: the Loma Prieta earthquake can be seen in hindsight as a example of cause and effect. But if John Searle had asked a scientist before the event to predict the outcome of a such an earthquake on the highway he would have got a guarded answer of “high probability of damage”; if he had been more specific and asked whether a particular section would collapse he would have received a more guarded answer; if he had asked whether a particular section would fall to the left or the right of its original position he would have been told “this cannot be calculated”. Cause and effect can be seen in action but the exact outcome cannot be predicted.
No one, including myself, could have predicted whether after reading the article I would write this letter. The final decision is based on how irate the article made me, whether I could put together a cogent rebuttal, if I had the time, if external events (including the inclement weather) might have distracted me etc. As I write this paragraph I still do not know whether the letter will actually be sent, just that the probability is increasing.
Chaos creates a level of uncertainty in my thoughts and decisions that gives the illusion of free will. No one can distinguish between that illusion and any other definition of free will. The world is still governed by a set of scientific rules and we all still have free will.
From Antti Wiio
John Searle thinks that for us to have a free will, there must be a cap of causality somewhere in the chains of neurophysiologial events behind our mental processes. This reductionist view does not take into account the possible different levels of causal explanations.
Consider an example: A traffic light turns to red, and you brake to stop your car. This event can be described as a chain of physical, causal events involving photons, receptors, axons, neurons, synapses, muscles etc. Such a description would be horrendously complex, but in theory it is doable.
But there is another level of causal explanations: your car stops because a legislative body passed a traffic rule that decrees that it must. This causal explanation does not in any way invalidate the causal explanation of physical sciences. These two levels of explanations really answer different sets questions. Physical sciences answer questions that can be stated within their conceptual frameworks. But physical sciences do not give you a vocabulary for asking questions about traffic rules.
Although traffic laws are purely mental construct, they do cause measurable physical events. That proves that traffic laws are no less real than the laws of physical sciences.
I don’t see how the physical sciences could be the right level at which to ask questions about free will. To answer such a question, you must first set your levels and definitions. At most, you might be able to answer that “within these definitions, we do/do not have a free will”. But there will probably always be a nagging doubt about whether the definitions catch the essence of the idea of free will.
And now, a real twister for you: does the legislative body have a free will?
Helsinki, Finland
Waste not, want jobs
Ed Douglas’s discussion of sustainable design misses an important point (6 January, p 31). Throwaway consumerism is not a personal choice, but a consequence of our economic system.
I own and use a Singer treadle sewing machine built in the 1890s. The only maintenance it has needed is occasional cleaning and oiling. Fortunately for its employees and technicians, Singer now produces electrical sewing machines of such mechanical complexity that they are bound to break and need repair or replacement within a few years.
If Singer were still building machines to last, where would its unemployed workforce get the money to responsibly buy durable goods? How ethical is it of me to still be using a product built by their great-great-great-grandparents?
From Richard Holroyd
Not only does it often cost more to get many electrical goods repaired professionally nowadays than to buy new, but most people would not even think of trying to repair them themselves. The microwave oven is a classic example.
One of the commonest faults in electrical devices is a blown fuse. In a microwave, there are two or three fuses inside: to find them you just need to take off the outer casing, which is held on by a few screws in the back. In the UK new fuses cost about 拢1 each 鈥� but if you take the whole thing to a shop to be repaired it will cost you 拢30 or more.
In a better designed microwave those internal fuses would be readily accessible and replaceable like those in UK plugs. It would certainly save a lot of microwaves from the scrap heap.
Cambridge, UK
Drink to me with thine 卢s
In attempting to respond to research that shows that industry-backed papers are more than seven times as likely to produce a conclusion favouring a company’s product, the British Soft Drinks Association suggests that “the hypothesis that research likely to be helpful to industry is more likely to attract its funding” should have been tested (27 January, p 20). If the industry were directing its cash in this way, would it not be seeking to influence the spread of research results?
Anyway, it is meaningless to talk about hypotheses not explored. As any half-awake philosopher of science will remind you, there are an infinite number of hypotheses. So the association leaves itself open to the appearance of spreading “reasonable doubt” for legal purposes, in the same way the tobacco industry did.
The editor writes:
鈥� Researcher David Ludwig says that his paper did address the issues raised by the British Soft Drinks Association. Bias can occur in many ways: some that might be apparent in a review of study quality 鈥� for example, inappropriate selection of controls; and some that may not 鈥� for example, failure to publish negative studies, or failure to fund studies that ask questions in a way that the industry does not like. Ludwig’s study was designed to investigate correlations between funding and outcome, not to distinguish between various hypotheses explaining how bias might occur.
Wild resources
We welcome Bob Holmes’s pragmatic look at how conservation can be achieved through use of wild resources (6 January, p 6). Relatively few people have the inclination or financial means to go trophy hunting in Africa. However, many of us recently decorated our houses with wild living resources like holly and mistletoe, or caught or ate wild fish or meat over the festive season. Others prefer to capture wildlife in photographs, though this kind of tourism has a relatively heavy impact on local resources and services per dollar spent.
Use of wild living resources generates huge revenues, even in developed countries. A 5-yearly survey by the US departments of the interior and commerce recorded that $108 billion had been spent on hunting, fishing and viewing wildlife in the US in 2001.
Given the complex land use and wildlife-related interests in Europe, it is a huge challenge to marshal all our scientific, social and economic endeavours to produce incentives for conservation. Incentives generated by recreational hunting were discussed at a Zoological Society of London symposium in October 2006, and when the symposium’s publication comes out in late 2007 it will deal at greater length with many of the arguments and opportunities Bob Holmes has highlighted.
Clone concern
While I agree with Donald Bruce that the claims for therapeutic applications of cloned embryos are highly speculative and exaggerated, he does not provide a technical case for concern (20 January, p 17). Could a bovine-human chimera or hybrid clone provide a Trojan horse for diseases to enter our species? For example, although the genetics of the nucleus would not in principle be affected, could mitochondrial DNA derived from the animal cell hide viral contaminants?
Aside from Bruce’s religious convictions, if ethics means anything in science it must recognise an imperative to protect the human genome from such hazards. It is certainly not religious fundamentalism to warn against the sorcerer’s apprentice.
The editor writes:
鈥� As far as we know there are no viruses embedded in the mitochondrial genome; but we are prepared to be proved wrong.
Free will
John Searle takes us on a fascinating and cogent logical journey around the terrain of free will (13 January, p 48). But I baulked at the assertion that “at the quantum level, the absence of causally sufficient conditions produces randomness”.
Surely it would be more accurate to say that the absence of any determining factor allows the continued co-existence of all possible outcomes? Is our notion of “free will”, then, a manifestation of the pre-observed quantum state 鈥� perhaps “collapsing” into a decision? Might “fate”, where we may perceive or suspect it, be a phenomenon of entanglement?
From Bjarne Hellemann
So John Searle has chosen to spread a little confusion regarding the much cherished notion of “free will”. The “problems” of consciousness, and of free will as well as many others, are merely pseudo-problems demonstrating that dear old dualism is still with us.
When I choose one thing rather than another, there may be many reasons, some of which I am conscious of 鈥� and others which I don’t know about and, properly, don’t care about. If you like you can say that all these determine my choice and so, in an absolute sense, there is no “free” will. But who holds the curious idea that there could be any phenomenon in the universe that is totally independent of the rest of the universe? It’s the old “problem” of mind versus body, or soul versus material world. Ren茅 Descartes thought that there must be an organ in the brain where two worlds could somehow connect. Our current knowledge tells us that there are no such things as separate subjective and objective worlds: there are no signs of superior beings residing above the profane material world.
If I “drink my mead with a will”, to paraphrase an Icelandic saga, it is sufficient that there is a will, be it more or less free. The philosophical confusion arises because “free” is defined as unbounded, limitless freedom from causal and material phenomena, corresponding to the belief that consciousness, mind or soul are phenomena or entities separated from matter 鈥� and incidentally facilitates belief in purely spiritual beings.
脜rhus, Denmark
From John Brew
As John Searle suggests, there doesn’t seem to be much room for free will in the usual scientific paradigms. But is it possible to state what assumptions need to be relaxed in order for free will to appear?
Would some knowledge of the future, allowing a circular causal loop, be sufficient? If so, would a control theory or feedback-loop formulation with negative time lag produce free will? Would a conscious mind and a model of the future be sufficient? And what, in that case, would be the minimal properties that characterise a “conscious mind”?
Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, UK
Gorillas are vegetarians
Linda Doran writes that “there are many instances” of gorillas “hunting and exhibiting cannibalism, recorded by Dian Fossey and others” (9 December 2006, p 25). Gorillas have not been reported hunting for meat, nor exhibiting cannibalism, by Dian Fossey or anyone else.
I studied the ecology of lowland gorillas throughout the 1980s and 1990s. My colleague Liz Williamson is a former director of the research programmes at the Karisoke Research Centre in Rwanda, which was started by Dian Fossey. We can confirm that neither activity has been observed at any site where gorillas have been studied. Gorillas do eat ants and termites, but they are otherwise vegetarians in the wild. I suspect confusion between Dian Fossey’s work on gorillas and Jane Goodall’s work on chimpanzees.
The war on error
You state that “[clinical trials] may have to be funded by charities, universities and governments: harmaceutical companies are unlikely to pay because they can’t make money on unpatented medicines” (20 January, p 13).
Is this an example of a Freudian typo? Or perhaps New 杏吧原创 is following the Dickensian example of naming characters (or in this case market sectors) after personality traits?
For the record
鈥� We misreported meteorologist Pascal Mailier as saying that the UK Meteorological Office’s long-range winter forecasts are no better than presuming the coming winter will be the same as the last (27 January, p 32). His argument is that they are no better than a running average of the last two winters.
鈥� The proposed nuclear railway locomotive reactor would have been 3.05 metres long, not 305 mm as we wrote on 24 January 1957, p 26.
鈥� Several readers complain that the dancing cow illustrating Feedback, 20 January, appears to have six teats. It was of course drawn as seen by an intoxicated fellow dancer.
Dancing cows
Feedback appears to doubt that cows may dance in response to electric fields (20 January). I wouldn’t put it past cows in certain pastures to put on a bit of a dance. Badly installed single-wire earth return (SWER) electricity distribution systems can indeed result in great potential differences in the soil between the beast’s front and hind legs. And, although illustrator Paul McDevitt may not have intended this, dancing on one pair of hooves would perhaps lessen the creature’s discomfort.
Of course, SWER distribution greatly reduces the cost of electricity distribution in rural areas.
Twice half a point
Feedback is campaigning against reducible fractions 鈥� for example, the Global Surveyor “zooming around Mars twice every two hours” (16 December 2006). This strikes me as just another vain attempt to rationalise English idiom 鈥� in this case an old one: “Of all the cases that I haue seene in this kind, I haue not knowne aboue three in three hundred, that haue beene iustly prosecuted in Court” (Mateo Alem谩n’s The Rogue, 1623, p 231).
Let Mister Rochester (Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, 1847, chapter 14) have the last word: “Not three in three thousand raw school-girl governesses would have answered me as you have just done.”
Not here, we don't
While advising “mind the mistletoe” you refer to the “Malay kiss” (23/30 December 2006, p 42). I am a Malay living in Malaysia and like most people here am Muslim. I have never in my life heard of the “Malay kiss”. Many Muslims observe rules against such close proximity.
The editor writes:
鈥� It was Charles Darwin who coined the term.