Editor's pick: Consciousness is like the shape of smoke 鈥� or fundamental (1)
Consciousness is, and always has been, a territory littered with shape-shifting concepts. Your article (23 June, p 28) illustrates this. Consciousness is acknowledged to be an “” property of more fundamental processes: so the discussion is like trying to define the shape of smoke – a major problem is where to attack.
As said in his speech launching Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization: “the problem is not primarily to find the right answer, but to find the right question.”
Editor's pick: Consciousness is like the shape of smoke 鈥� or fundamental (2)
The wager between David Chalmers and Christof Koch on finding a specific signature of consciousness in the brain by 2023, as described by Per Snaprud, was over before it began. The entire endeavour of searching for neural correlates of consciousness is predicated on a reductionist methodological assumption that rules out in advance the very subjective first-person nature of consciousness. As neuroscientist Ray Tallis wrote, “we cannot therefore conclude that when we see what seem to be neural correlates of consciousness that we are seeing consciousness itself” (9 January 2010, p 28).
Much more promising is Chalmers's inkling that consciousness may be fundamental. Conscious observation appears to change the behaviour of subatomic particles and even to bring about their physical realisation. This suggests to me that consciousness is a fundamental, irreducible feature of the universe, like space and time. As Max Planck, founder of quantum theory, stated, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.” Searching for neural correlates may give some interesting results, but it is simply barking up the wrong tree.
Is cancer screening a health funding issue?
You discuss the risks and benefits of screening for breast and cervical cancer and note that false positive results lead to emotional distress, unnecessary surgery and debilitating side effects (Leader, 2 June). Over decades, I have seen women becoming increasingly well-informed and comfortable in discussing issues openly, thanks to publicity from the National Health Service. I have never heard anyone say they wish they had never been screened, even after a lump turned out to be benign.
It is interesting that criticisms of screening programmes appear in the context of NHS cuts. The best way to reduce worry is to reduce ignorance and delay, so why not expand support for people going through screening and speed up the process? In fact, in my experience, the latter has greatly improved: it used to take one to two months to get initial results, now it takes one to two weeks.
You are quite right to pursue the scandal of mesh implants and the possibility that sexism contributed to the dismissal of early complaints about these, but this is quite a different problem.
First class post – 21 July 2018
Did anyone think human evolution was a linear series? It's a marvellous rat's nest.
Marjorie Meldrum of bizarre fossils from China rewriting the story of human evolution (7 July, p 28)
Clinical trial bias affects half the population
You are concerned by biological bias in clinical trials (Leader, 30 June). In the late 1980s, I was studying for a master's degree in public health. We were told even then that women were excluded from many clinical trials because of “hormone fluctuation”. I had two questions: if drugs are not tested on women because of this, how can we possibly know whether the drugs work and whether they are dangerous? And how can it be legal to prescribe drugs that have not been tested on the half of the population that has such variability? I find it hard to believe that these questions have still not been answered.
Why so dispirited about tidal energy's potential?
Hans van Haren says that tidal energy can supply only relatively small amounts of power (23 June, p 24). He virtually rules out future use of general tidal power. I find this depressing and self-defeating.
When I have an academic problem to solve, I leave my office and go to the coast a few hundred metres away. There – irrespective of the weather – I see the moon's gravitational power just asking to be harnessed by an inventive, optimistic human to virtually solve our energy problems.
The first Australians and their first satellite (1)
Alice Klein says that all Australian satellites were launched from other countries (30 June, p 25). In fact, Australia was third to launch a satellite from its own territory, after the Soviet Union and US. was launched from the Woomera Rocket Range on 29 November 1967 atop a US Redstone rocket. It was built at the then Weapons Research Establishment in Adelaide, where I worked on it: the University of Adelaide's physics department provided some experiments. It completed 642 orbits.
The first Australians and their first satellite (2)
Klein says Australia “has lots of empty space for launch sites”. It is possible that the traditional owners may be prepared to negotiate such a use of their lands, but invoking the colonial conceit that this is “nobody's land” – a terra nullius – is not a good place to start discussions.
Wine fix is the chemistry, not the magnetism
You report that magnets can make wine taste better by sucking out bad flavours (23 June, p 14). But I find the clever chemistry far more interesting. The researchers in the presence of the target substance to leave it covered with holes that are “imprinted” with the shape of the molecules, allowing the plastic to bind the substance. They coated magnetic beads with the plastic so that it could easily be collected.
Giving the impression that the magnets do the job is unfortunate given the number of fruitloops selling us magnetic devices that they claim will improve cars' efficiency, remove scale from pipes – or improve wine just by sitting the bottle on a special stand (Feedback, 27 April 2013).
A streetcar-framed quagmire of ethics
Clare Wilson reports research on a variant of the “trolley problem”, in which people were told they could save five mice from an electric shock by choosing to inflict pain on one (19 May, p 14). I don't recall anyone addressing why people presume they have a right, let alone are obligated, to choose. I use the trolley problem in counselling clients who struggle with counterproductive behaviours. Almost none see the lone victim as having a right to their good fortune of not being in the path of the runaway trolley. People just feel bad about having to kill the loner to save the many.
In a similar scenario of stealing a scarce lifesaving drug from a person who has paid for it, to give lower doses to three others at an earlier stage of the disease who can't afford it, clients are usually shakier about their ethics – and even more so if the single person is supposed to be a loved one.
As for what self-driving vehicles should do: whoever benefits most from the car should bear the brunt of its consequences. If you want to go faster than walking, don't expect to use others as your crash padding.
How to think about zero or more multiverses (1)
Your articles on “How to think about…” were all fascinating. But the piece on the multiverse claimed that it is not a hypothesis but is “forced upon us” (30 June, p 29). There is no evidence for a multiverse. It seems very much like the idea that the sun revolves around Earth: it makes perfect sense superficially, until you start to look closely. Then you have to bring in more and more special cases to explain exceptions until the theories become so complex that they are replaced.
How to think about zero or more multiverses (2)
Daniel Cossins discusses two kinds of multiverse: inflationary and quantum. Both seem to assume that everything started with our one solitary big bang. That seems parochial, akin to this Earth being unique and at the centre of all things.
Is it not more conceivable that many big bangs have created many universes? Or, indeed, in an infinite void, that there have been infinitely many such happenings over an infinity of time?
Presumably different expanding universes might clash and, depending on the predominance of matter and antimatter from previous mixing, might annihilate each other or aggregate. This would result in a vast energy that eventually spawns another singularity, another universe. A consequence might be that an infinity of mixing would lead to something amazingly improbable: some universes would have an excess of matter over antimatter.
It'll take a bit longer to get to Proxima Centauri
Frédéric Marin and Camille Beluffi find that a crew of 98 might be all that is needed for humanity to reach Proxima Centauri in 6300 years at 700,000 kilometres per hour (23 June, p 4). In , they say this is the speed of the Parker Solar Probe. But it will achieve this only by falling deep into the gravity well of the sun. With current technology, a craft would take many tens of thousands of years to reach Proxima Centauri.
The editor writes:
• The Parker Solar Probe was chosen as broadly representative of current technology. A colony ship would, of course, require new technologies to succeed.
For the record – 21 July 2018
• Divers get the bends when they ascend (30 June, p 41).
• Strewth! Australia occupies less than one-ninth of Earth's circumference at its latitude, but aerials there can “see” one-third of a satellite's orbit (30 June, p 25).