High-tech borders
Paul Marks ends his article on robot border guards (9 January, p 20) with a question about the privacy implications of such surveillance technologies for people who live close by.
There are other questions we should be asking, such as whether technology really is the answer to controlling illegal immigration. The main reasons people leave their homes, often under dangerous circumstances, are poverty, war, tyranny, corruption and injustice. Are better radar and sensors the way to deal with these issues? If the world tackled the socio-economic problems behind illegal immigration, perhaps rich countries would not have to hide behind high-tech borders.
From Tim Sprod
Regarding the emergent high-tech border guards reported by Paul Marks, it strikes me that if we spent more money and effort ensuring that the “have nots” had more access to what the “haves” have, then we could spend less on keeping the “have nots” away from the “haves”.
Taroona, Tasmania, Australia
In your head
Ray Tallis gets it right when he argues that we are a long way from explaining the origin of consciousness (9 January, p 28), but while he does a very good job of deconstructing some of the research and assumptions surrounding this topic, he fails to address the biggest hurdle: what does he, or indeed anyone else, mean by “consciousness”?
Humanities students are taught to carefully define their terms before beginning to discuss them. Philosophers have wrestled inconclusively with the term “consciousness” for centuries.
The concept of consciousness may seem self-evident. Indeed, most people will think that they have understood it until they try to describe exactly what they mean. The difficulty arises because we are dealing with an abstract idea, and a simple definition like “self-awareness” immediately runs into trouble because it uses more abstractions without concrete reference points to define another term which also lacks such reference points.
From Gerald Rudolph
Perhaps Ray Tallis could have gone a bit further in his article on consciousness. He wrote of science beginning when we escape our first-person subjective experience. Yet the conceptual understanding of science itself, with its logical and mathematical thinking, consists of activities occurring in that same piece of flesh that the neurophysiologists are exploring.
Even if we believe that we have a form of scientific objectivity, each one of us is still limited by the fact that we are corporeal human beings, and consequently are constrained by the particular types of chemical activity that take place in our brains as we reason about their perceptions.
However objective neurophysiologists try to be, their research still boils down to consciousness studying consciousness.
Lexington, South Carolina, US
From Derek Bolton
When discussing the “unity” of consciousness, Ray Tallis says he “can relate [experiences] at a given time (the pressure of the seat on my bottom, the sound of traffic, my thoughts) to one another as elements of a single moment”. Maybe he can, but I can’t. I can contemplate each different input in turn, but to what extent am I really aware of them all at once?
There are known limits to how well we can discern the order of two sensory inputs of different types. An explanation of continuity of experience and the simultaneous nature of events could be that they are illusions constructed from memory.
Tallis further maintains, when talking about the biology of the brain, that “there is nothing in the convergence… of neural pathways that gives us this… ability to see things as both whole and separate”. Not so. For example, it is possible to experience the whole of a piece of music when I listen to it: I am aware of the melody and the rhythm, and the synthesis of the two, because each of these three aspects of the music can have its own neural correlate.
Birchgrove, New South Wales, Australia
From Tim Wilkinson
As Ray Tallis suggests, any account of consciousness based on brain function will lack a plausible explanation for how the cold unconscious world of particles and forces is able to perform the trick of generating a subjective, self-aware experience. Nevertheless, if we show that the brain can generate consciousness, it is not necessary to know how it does so to rule out supernatural sources. We can be sure that the provenance of consciousness is entirely natural.
By what means we will solve the difficult “how” question we cannot say at this stage. The answer may involve completely new phenomena, hitherto unnoticed. Perhaps we will never know, but while we wait for the answer, philosophers are justified in claiming that a proper explanation of consciousness cannot come from any possible rearrangement of the kind of physics we already have.
We should be pleased: even if space and matter yield their secrets to the Large Hadron Collider, we have something even more fascinating to investigate.
Houghton-le-Spring, Tyne and Wear, UK
Feel the music
The list of obscure or little-studied emotions in Jessica Griggs’s article (16 January, p 26) barely scratched the surface.
As any music-lover knows, there is a world of intense emotions out there that are impossible to verbalise or conceptualise. To experience music is to experience a separate universe, one created entirely by humans. The deeper we penetrate this world, the more subtle it becomes and the harder to describe.
Perhaps in trying to understand our experience of music we are faced with the same kinds of problems we encounter when trying to understand consciousness 鈥� in other words, we have little idea how it comes about or even how to talk or think about it. But for anyone who listens to music, there is a glory, a passion, an intensity that constitutes a marvellous synthesis of both intellect and emotions.
Weather isn't climate
Michael Le Page roundly turns on anyone who dares to suggest that the current severe winter conditions throughout the northern hemisphere put a question mark over the existence of global warming (16 January, p 20). If that were right, he says, the sceptics would have to accept that a spell of hot weather would mean the climate was getting warmer 鈥� equally nonsensical, since extreme weather proves nothing about climate change.
Yet don’t those who subscribe to the idea of climate change regularly fall into the same trap, using extreme weather scenarios 鈥� or the lack of them 鈥� to make their case? For example, in 2000 David Viner, then of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, claimed a consequence of global warming would be that within a few years children in the UK “just aren’t going to know what snow is”.
Would Le Page also dismiss Viner as “intellectually challenged or plain dishonest”?
Race to metric
I was disappointed by David Cohen’s article about the 1000 mph car (21 November 2009, p 38): surely in this day and age you could use metric units. In New Zealand and Australia we gave up the archaic imperial measurements about 30 years ago.
I know that the US and, to a lesser extent, the UK insist on staying in the dinosaur age but how can they be expected to join the rest of the world if a scientific magazine such as yours condones the continued use of this anachronism?
The editor writes:
鈥� “The 1609.3 kph car” would have lacked charisma. The teams we reported chose 1000 mph as their target, so just this once, for ease of comparison, we used miles per hour throughout the article.
Blink of a butterfly
I was astounded to read in The Last Word piece about how high butterflies fly (16 January) that commercial airline pilots have reported seeing monarch butterflies at between 3000 and 4000 metres. What I would give for eyesight that good: commercial airlines cruise at about 250 metres per second. How do pilots manage such feats of observation?
Mac attack
In Paul Marks’s article on the dangers of hackers using networks of computers to eavesdrop on conversations on your laptop or smartphone (16 January, p 17), an anonymous “security expert” claimed that such attacks are too crude to pose a serious threat. “It is unlikely any worthwhile target will use Windows unpatched,” he says, “and few Apple Mac users would voluntarily install unknown software.”
I must assume that this expert either works in academia, where the world may look different, or has had little exposure to commercial security testing. There is little evidence that Apple Mac users are any more security conscious than anyone else.
Pizza perfect
As an employee of a chain of pizza restaurants, I initially found Stephen Ornes’s article on the mathematics of preparing perfect pizza portions highly insightful (12 December 2009, p 48).
However, as soon as I began to attempt the method it described I floundered. This only appears to work with margherita pizzas and others with a strictly uniform distribution of toppings.
Alas, I found it of little help when sharing pizza with my fellow employees.
For the record
鈥� Possessing a “grid” of brain cells that helps us to navigate might explain why some people are better at finding their way around than others (23 January, p 15). Although these cells provide a virtual grid on which locations in the world can be represented in the brain, we should have made it clear that the cells themselves are not arranged in a physical grid.