Editor's pick: Why would AIs correct politicians?
Your Leader suggests that artificial intelligence technologies will help to hold powerful people to account for ill-formed or lie-based arguments (10 September, p 3). This is as silly as suggesting that making encryption illegal will stop criminals using it, despite their demonstrated propensity to ignore inconvenient laws. Politicians with their pants on fire are not being held to account in this post-truth world because it is no longer considered unreasonable to base arguments on opinion and emotion alone.
You use Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the US House of Representatives, as an example of a successful politician not appealing to reason. Why, therefore, would logical reasoning about their fallacious arguments be any more acceptable from an AI?
People tend to believe what they want to believe, as the phenomenon of confirmation bias makes evident. Apparently it is no longer enough to use logic to make one's point. Now that opinion is placed above, or at least on a par with, fact-based reasoning, there seems little point in attempting to improve standards of debate by logically proving the fallacious basis of their arguments.
The successful AIs might well be those that are prepared to pander to popular prejudice.
Metaphysics and consciousness
Despite your metaphysics special (3 September, p 33), philosophy is not in a competition with science to see which can come up with the better answers to the same questions. Philosophy in every area is the art of thinking as clearly and deeply as we can. In science, its task is to understand the nature and scope of scientific investigation. The idea that science can supersede philosophy is therefore ludicrous.
Metaphysics deals with how we view the fundamental nature of reality. Materialism – the belief that the nature of existence is at root that of mindless matter – is itself a metaphysical view.
And if consciousness is an illusion, then the belief that it is an illusion must also be an illusion, since it is, after all, part of our consciousness. If our thoughts have purely material causes, and could not have been other than they are, then we cannot know if they are true or false. If we do not have free will, we cannot know we don't have it.
Metaphysics and consciousness
Discussion about consciousness (or mind) seems always to assume it is a thing of substance. But its every manifestation, including thinking, remembering and deciding, rides on the arrow of time. It's always in the now. It is a process no different to an active computer program. To talk about the mind-body problem makes as much sense as talking about the hour-clock problem, or the travel-car problem.
Metaphysics and consciousness
Anil Ananthaswamy writes: “There are those who think that consciousness is something real and those who say it's a mirage… a trick of the mind.” Whether the words “mirage” and “trick” are metaphors, or to be taken literally, they both require a victim. If my brain was this victim, then there's no consciousness involved, and so no trick. There's only a trick if I'm conscious, in which case it's not a trick either.
First class post
But by all means, let’s remove environmental protection. Let the poison waters flow
Sharon at reports of an underground pipeline rupturing in Alabama (24 September, p 6)
Ants can teach us on consciousness
I suggest that the observations of Eciton army ants (10 September, p 29) showing complex emergent behaviour built on individual responses to simpler sensory inputs go a long way to explain human consciousness. Recent articles in New 杏吧原创 have gone to great lengths to explore human consciousness and whether other animals have it. I sometimes feel some would love to find some wondrous entity pulling levers in our brains: the explanation is in reality far simpler.
Particles that don't exist, or do
Andrea Taroni, while not denying the photon's existence, states: “the ‘central mystery’ of quantum theory… says that neither a wave nor a particle is a perfect way to think of a photon of light” (10 September, p 33). Indeed, it can be argued that the photon, too, is a particle that doesn't exist.
When we consider the energy and information transmitted by photons, with their zero rest mass, we observe only changes in the emitters and absorbers of whatever is transmitted. So any observable properties attributed to the photon, such as spin, should be traceable to the properties of the emitter and absorber themselves. Photons and light waves, are, I suggest, convenient mathematical fictions accounting for the relationship between emitter and absorber.
Particles that don't exist, or do
In a Mexican wave what seems to be travelling through the crowd is in fact a wave. Exactly the same thing happens to the atoms in a water wave.
Taroni implies that a photon of light is more real than a phonon, a pattern of vibration considered as a particle. The difference between the “immaterial” field and the rather more “concrete” particles can certainly make the systems feel different.
But in both cases the classical idea of energy transport by a wave acquires the characteristics of a particle when considered quantum mechanically. Photons and phonons have the same level of reality.
We can do without dark matter
The scientific method has in general been very successful, using a cycle of hypothesis, testing, and rejecting or accepting the hypothesis. For some obscure reason, dark matter is the exception to this.
Over more than 80 years, every experiment has failed to demonstrate that dark matter exists. Instead of rejecting the hypothesis of dark matter, some choose a kind of religious belief that dark matter must exist and continue searching for it (27 August, p 28).
Why not accept the logical alternative that there is no dark matter and that the established laws of gravitation need to be modified? Besides the Modified Newtonian Dynamics theory, there are other alternative theories, such as the Vacuum Modified Gravity that I describe at , which can perfectly explain the observed flat galaxy rotation curves without resorting to dark matter.
What makes a planet Earth-like?
I enjoyed your informative and marvellously illustrated coverage of the discovery of the planet orbiting Proxima Centauri (27 August, p 8). It does seem a bit misleading, though, to call it “Earth-like” on the cover and an “Earth” in the headline, given how little we really know about it beyond its orbit and its approximate mass.
As Jacob Aron noted in the article, the possible range of temperatures of the Proximan planet is from -33 °C to the “high hundreds”. So this planet could be frozen solid apart from the odd blast of extreme radiation, or similar to Venus, depending on its atmosphere. That atmosphere is, of course, as yet unknown. Things are complicated by the facts that Proxima Centauri frequently emits giant flares and that the planet is most likely tidally locked, facing only one side to its star.
Glenalta, South Australia
The editor writes:
• Proxima b is like the Earth in composition and location, as well as mass. “Earth-ish” would perhaps be most accurate, if only it were a word.
Progress and the motor of history
Zoltan Istvan's comment piece on his US Transhumanist Party suggested some dangers of an extreme “pro-science” approach to politics and society (27 August, p 18). It is indeed depressing how rarely politicians discuss scientific findings beyond the polarised rhetoric of bare statistics (shorn of methodological underpinnings). And, as Istvan points out, when addressing a US electorate that is “roughly 75 per cent Christian” politicians will often eschew science and reason altogether and fall back on traditional morality.
Surely any new approach that turns this on its head needs to give equal weight to more reasoned ethical values. Istvan may enthusiastically predict “the end of human death” for instance, but he must also be aware of the ethical considerations of such a “breakthrough” at a societal level.
Perhaps I'm overlooking some satirical intent (and there are certainly hints to that possibility in his writing) but, taken at face value, anybody who believes that science can only lead to progress needs to look to history.
Progress and the motor of history
I began reading Istvan with a feeling of mild optimism, but then I encountered his notions on telepathy and the elimination of human death by mid-century. I began to feel his article would be better filed under “fruitloopery” in Feedback's piling system.
My main reason for writing, though, is the fervent hope that your natural sense of fairness and fair play will not induce you, under any circumstances, to offer equal column space to other US presidential candidates. Please!
More exciting uses for DNA profiling
I am excited by the possibilities of DNA ecosystem surveillance (9 July, p 20). I suggest an excellent ecosystem to survey would be the river Ness in Scotland. Not only could we thus get irrefutable evidence of Nessie's existence. We could also establish her gender and whether she has a family.
Subsequently, we could take the technology downstream of the Himalayan rivers of ice to explore the hidden world of the Yeti.
The perfected technique could be applied to any solar sails we may build, so that we can harness solar energy from the one side while seeking evidence of panspermia on the reverse.
For the record
• One ring to tell us all: most communications and all broadcasting satellites are in geostationary orbits (27 August, p 16).
• That doesn't suck. The spacecraft will collect dust from asteroid Bennu by blowing it with nitrogen (10 September, p 4).
• Superconductors by definition have zero resistance (10 September, p 33).