Materialist mind
We are amazed by the claim by Mario Beauregard and Jeffrey M. Schwartz that Andy Clark’s reaction to the claims of non-materialist neuroscience betrays a “fundamental lack of knowledge of mind-brain interactions” (29 November, p 23).
They claim that neuro-imaging provides copious evidence of minds changing brains 鈥� for example, when a subject’s deliberate shift of attention alters their brain state in a way detectable by a scanner.
But this would lend support to the proposition that minds are non-material 鈥� in the strong sense of being beyond the natural order 鈥� only if we were to accept the assumption that thoughts, attending and mental activity are not realised in material substance.
For if they are, then all we are seeing is that one set of physical changes can lead to another. Their argument thus assumes that which it sets out to prove.
Nor should we be surprised that the mere impingement of information can itself have an impact on a physical system: for that information, too, is materially encoded and materially transmitted. For instance, there is nothing brutally physical about the overdraft in your bank account, but the representation of that overdraft is a material state that has plenty of well-known effects, all without benefit of immaterial minds.
We do not, of course, claim that there are no interesting problems facing a science of mind and of conscious experience. But the ability of physically encoded information to bring about physical changes in a purely material system is not one of them.
It is sad that, in their zeal to find room for faith in a non-material God, working scientists are willing to bracket so much of their own hard-won knowledge in return for the comforting shroud of mystery.
War over the brain
Of course we should be alarmed by the recent attempts to use brain science as a vehicle for spreading religious ideas (25 October, p 46). But it is scientists who today denounce the abuse of science for religious purposes who prepared the ground for this new intrusion of irrational ideas into science.
For decades they have announced that we will soon know “how the brain works”, how social behaviour, romantic love, a sensibility for irony, and so on are, they typically say, “hard-wired into our brains”. It seems more realistic, even for scientists not inclined to invoke the supernatural when things become complicated, to assume that even in 1000 years’ time we will not know how the brain works, as the late Australian neurophysiologist John Eccles predicted we wouldn’t.
The irritating discrepancy between what brain scientists and neuroscientists have been announcing and what we actually know is ideal for those who want to introduce religious notions into science, allowing them to point to problems where scientific “materialism” has “failed”.
The e-doctor is out
I was very interested in your article about “e-medicine”, but I was surprised to read that patients with bipolar disorder are “usually prescribed mood-stabilising drugs and one-on-one therapy” (8 November, p 24).
Not on the UK’s National Health Service, they’re not. Even the guidelines of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence say only that psychological treatment should be “considered”. Mental health trusts in the UK seem barely able to afford paper clips, never mind psychologists.
From Carol Stevenson
The potential for “e-doctors” to manage mental health problems is very interesting, but there is a complication. People with mental health problems are to live in poor accommodation or be homeless, and therefore far less likely to have an email address or regular access to a computer and suitable conditions for using online therapies.
There is little point in designing a therapy that is inaccessible to many of those who need it the most.
London, UK
How warfare evolved
The ideas on the origins of war that Bob Holmes reports (15 November, p 8) are not part of a “new theory”. The idea that warfare is primordial, innate and adaptive pre-dates the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s The Leviathan (1660) and has had steadfast supporters ever since.
The claim that, “for the first time, anthropologists, archaeologists, primatologists, psychologists and political scientists are approaching a consensus” goes beyond advancing the validity of the ideas proposed: it presents the theories as if they are uncontroversial and omits any mention of the large number of scientists in many fields who disagree with these notions about warfare. Two critically acclaimed recent works in this opposing camp, by anthropologists Donna Hart and Robert Sussman, and by psychologist Douglas Fry (reviewed 10 March 2007, p 49), come readily to mind.
The claims made incorporate numerous fallacies. One is to conflate aggression (both active and passive), violence, feuding and warfare: these, though often related, are not necessarily homologous or analogous either to one another or to superficially similar behaviours in non-human primates. Another is to obfuscate biological propensity 鈥� to assume that because a behaviour is “natural” it is also adaptive.
The overriding mistake is the lack of a nuanced view of the complex interplay between biology, culture and the environment. Assuming that a behaviour is biological without looking at context is just not very helpful. Specific kinds of subsistence strategies may make warfare or peace more likely, just as certain types of subsistence can alter female fecundity, for example. But just as humans figured out how to lower fertility to pre-agricultural levels through cultural practices, we can also learn to live in peace.
The march of tides
Jason Palmer’s article on tidal barrages was interesting but missed a major issue (11 October, p 35). Presumably, given its high capital cost, a barrage is expected to last for at least a century and possibly longer. Its most basic design parameter is head of water, determined by tide height. No one knows with any certainty where sea levels are going to be on these timescales. A major rise in sea level would mean costly rebuilding, unless it was built for the worst-case scenario, which would mean massive over-expenditure if sea levels didn’t rise.
Forever young
Great: by calling ageing “andropause” we can classify it as a disease and give testosterone supplements to men over 65 in an attempt to turn them once more into hormone-driven 18-year-olds (1 November, p 8).
Just what society needs!
Feeding your gizmos
I disagree with your statement that charging a laptop battery “little and often reduces its capacity to charge” (15 November, p 42). This may have been true in the past 鈥� when nickel-cadmium batteries were the standard 鈥� but lithium-ion/metal hydride batteries do not suffer the same affliction. With more intelligent chargers, the necessity to charge-cycle your batteries has gone.
From Matthew Walker,
You say that electrical items that are turned off and not left on standby use no electricity. In creating our online power-consumption database, we have found that this isn’t always true and is sometimes alarmingly false. For example, we discovered a microwave oven that uses 80 watts while doing nothing, and a cathode-ray-tube monitor that consumes 7 watts just by being plugged in. On the other hand, the TV set-top box you mention may use 17 watts on standby, but mine uses just 5.
London, UK
Seeds of truth
I agree that it would help if what you call “the GM debate” became less polarised and more constructive (8 November, p 5). But this “debate” is just part of a problem masquerading as a whole problem.
Most media reporting on issues of genetic modification of food species is presented as if there were no such thing as a long history of successful crop and animal improvement through selective breeding 鈥� as if there were no alternative to GM. In reality, the advances in orthodox techniques have been and continue to be remarkable 鈥� and at no actual or potential risk to wild populations.
The “green revolution” of the 1970s did not come about through GM, and nor did any of the development of any of our domesticated crops and animals. Why do you not mention this? Another problem is that “the debate” is quite blatantly skewed because of the commercial pressures on one side.
Beasts like us
Can someone please explain why behavioural scientists are so unwilling to contemplate the possibility that other animals’ thought processes are at root similar to our own 鈥� as evidenced by findings on their memory (1 November, p 32)? Surely the simplest assumption must be that they are similar. Yet there appears to be a desperate rearguard action to deny even the possibility.
I assume that this goes back to the “behaviourist” psychology promoted by B. F. Skinner 鈥� and this seems to me to take the form of the novelist Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. We should believe only that which animals tell us; and since they cannot talk we should believe nothing 鈥� nor, in the case of Alex, the African grey parrot whose exploits feature in one of your reviews (8 November, p 47), even if they can talk.
Following the “Bayesian” approach of estimating the prior probabilities of explanations (10 May, p 44) would lead us instead to assume that other animals are essentially like us, and then require evidence to the contrary. Is it that behaviourists do not accept that we are animals? That must make it very hard to do good science.
Trained scientists
It is the height of a very subjective and particularly human conceit to believe that non-human animals are some kind of stimulus-response-driven robots incapable of thought or feeling (1 November, p 32). Every scientist working in this field should be given a cat.
Once the cats have the scientists fully trained to open and close doors, choose the right kind of cat food and provide them with a comfortable lap to sit on, they might serve humanity better in useful fields of endeavour.
Overenergiser
Charlie Robinson pokes fun at concerns about the safety of lithium-ion batteries in cars, pointing out that today’s cars carry a tankful of fuel (5 November, p 21). There are important differences.
A lithium-ion cell can immediately in an explosion, because it isn’t dependent on atmospheric oxygen as an oxidiser. A tankful of petrol cannot instantly explode (outside the movies). In the event of an accident, petrol is liable to be spilled and catch fire 鈥� nasty enough, but for petrol to cause a major explosion, it has to vaporise and mix with a large volume of air. This can happen after a road accident, but it is quite unusual, and it takes a while, almost always long enough for injured people to be removed from the scene.
Tax and save
A. C. Grayling describes the credit crunch in terms of banks’ actions (8 November, p 48). But the engine of this crisis, the root of the problem, was created by the US Congress allowing residents to deduct from taxable income the interest on mortgages on houses, holiday homes and sail boats, up to a million dollars’ worth.
A something-for-nothing universe
Lawrence Krauss is vastly oversimplifying when he names the theologian Thomas Aquinas as the architect of the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (22 November, p 53). Aquinas was in fact concerned with the so-called cosmological argument: “god must exist, since god must have been the first cause”. He did not originate this argument either, but he greatly developed it and set out three different versions in great detail as three of his famous “five ways” in Summa Theologica (1265-1274).
While Aquinas was explicitly trying to show that god must exist, the “why something rather than nothing” question is perfectly valid and interesting, not to say difficult, even in a godless universe such as the one in which we happen to live. Many philosophical heavyweights have referred to it as the most fundamental question in the history of philosophy, and physicists are welcome to agree.
The observation that the universe may be flat and hence its total energy zero is certainly fascinating and helps avoid a clash between the appearance of the universe in the first place and the first law of thermodynamics, although until the nature of dark energy is much better understood it is perhaps a little premature to declare that particular conundrum finally resolved.
As for Aquinas, nothing as complicated as the curvature of the universe is required to refute the cosmological argument, which is so inherently shaky that the slightest logical nudge brings it crashing down. “What caused god?” is the devastating objection that theologians have conspicuously failed to answer despite centuries of mental gymnastics with infinite regress and necessary-versus-contingent beings. The cosmological argument simply contradicts itself and should be allowed to rest in peace (though I somehow doubt that it will be). The question “why is there something rather than nothing?” is very much alive and kicking.
From Cameron, W. S. K. (Scott),
Addressing Aquinas’s query, Lawrence Krauss argues that a universe whose total gravitational energy is zero answers this question, “at least if it is reframed as ‘how’ rather than ‘why'”. Unfortunately, Krauss misunderstands Aquinas, who insists on distinguishing the question how from the metaphysically essential question why 鈥� a question that remains unanswered by the physical evidence, whatever it may be.
Imagine three firms, each of which starts up, runs for a while, and then folds. Forensic accountants later discover that one firm ran profitably under its founder but sold assets and folded for lack of an heir; another sputtered along before foundering under debt; and a third ran in an orderly way, balancing its books all through its waxing and waning.
Like the zero-energy universe, the third firm’s accounting is the most elegant, since we need not explain the capital or debt left at the end. But the universe’s elegant balance of energy no more explains why it came into being than the elegantly balanced books explains why the firm came into being.
Aquinas’s point (against Aristotle) was that without a Creator, the question why was unanswerable; and he took that as a liability of Aristotle’s Creator-less eternal universe. But Aquinas was fair in recognising that one could just ignore the question. Krauss, in contrast, suggests that a “something-for-nothing” universe may be “not just possible, but necessary” only by misconstruing Aquinas’s point.
Los Angeles, CA, US
Re: Relativity鈥�
Mark Buchanan says that the physicist Albert Einstein made an error in assigning a special status to light when he developed his theory of Special Relativity (1 November, p 28). I do not think that this is what actually happened.
Einstein was building on the observational work of his contemporaries who found that light appears to have the same velocity relative to any observer regardless of the speed of the light source relative to that observer. He realised that this fact meant that he would have to develop a new physics that could explain such a counter-intuitive reality. I do not believe he considered light to be unique; rather, the fact that it behaves in the way that it does caused him to develop his theory as he did.
In the work Buchanan reports, some very inventive physicists and mathematicians have discovered a mathematics-based physics that is more basic than that developed by Einstein. This apparently explains not only the relativistic phenomena that intrigued Einstein, but also the recently discovered repulsive energy that is apparently accelerating the expansion of the universe. It does nothing to besmirch Einstein’s brilliant work of last century. It is a nice example of the way that science works over time. Each new generation of scientists is able to see a bit more deeply than their predecessors.