Editor's pick: The importance of choosing to pretend that we have free will (1)
Tom Stafford notes the ability of a cellular automaton to generate an endless, unpredictable set of behaviours, given the right rules and starting conditions 鈥� importantly, not the same starting conditions (6 April, p 34). I am not clear why this should give comfort to those who believe that free will isn’t a meaningless illusion.
Many people who logically believe that free will is an illusion, as I do, act as though we have faith that free will is real. Doing so avoids a nihilistic approach to life and a loss of purpose.
But sometimes, a reversion to the belief that it is an illusion can engender a more tolerant attitude to those whose actions are antisocial, or whose opinions are contrary to ours.
Editor's pick: The importance of choosing to pretend that we have free will (2)
Stafford’s fascinating article on free will argues that if a simple model like a cellular automaton can generate complex, non-linear states, then animals can’t be mere mechanistic machines. He suggests that we need choice to navigate and respond to the non-predictable conditions that our complex world generates.
I agree. But this might seem to skirt the infamous sphexish wasp that always mechanically returns to put its prey back and recheck its tunnel for blockages. A wasp is itself a system capable of complex behaviour, so why doesn’t it show it? Is it because it becomes locked in a “behaviour attractor”, a depression in the space of possible behaviours that is hard to escape?
I suggest that a useful definition of human intelligence is the ability to think, speak and act in a non-mechanistic way and that it is in the rare moments when we choose to do this that we are the most free and, perhaps, most human.
First class post 鈥� 27 April 2019
is unimpressed with the size of the prize for solving the “P=NP” problem in mathematics (20 April, p 15)
Couldn’t you use it to steal all the secrets? Seems that would net you more than 拢1M
Functional disorders may still have physical causes (1)
While the article on functional disorders was enlightening (6 April, p 28), as a scientist I find myself uneasy at the idea that no physical cause can be found. Given that the brain is a physical object, anything that happens in the brain has a physical cause.
It may be that functional symptoms are caused more by “software” than by the brain’s hardware, but that is itself created by the brain’s topology and neurons, and hence by its physical functioning. There may also be a physical cause that isn’t detectable using current imaging and diagnostic techniques. Consider viral or prion damage within cells, or a genetic predisposition to over or underproduce neurotransmitters, perhaps only in certain regions of the brain.
Neurologists of the future may be embarrassed by the whole “functional disorder” label.
Functional disorders may still have physical causes (2)
No one who has had the misfortune to suffer from an invisible illness would use the word “think” so carelessly, as in saying that “we can think ourselves ill”. We understand “thinking” to mean consciously having thoughts. People with functional disorders are at the mercy of some neurological dysfunction, which is a little more complicated than that, and which isn’t properly understood and certainly isn’t conscious.
I gather from the article that no one suffering from functional disorders decided that they would like to be ill. I have had chronic fatigue for 35 years. People find it really hard to imagine how I am feeling when I look quite normal. Those of us with chronic fatigue have a battle on our hands to be taken seriously by family, friends, employers and doctors.
In desperation, people are being ripped off by quacks. We need all the help that we can get. Please don’t make things any harder.
The editor writes:
鈥� We apologise. We have changed the wording of the article online (bit.ly/NS-FD).
When order arises and when it fights back (1)
Thank you for the feature on the possibility of selection by persistence (23 March, p 34). It is true that whenever a system, whether a saucepan of water on a flame or a planet orbiting a star, is agitated by a flux of energy, it is inevitable that structures will form (21 January 2012, p 32). The stable structures will dominate the unstable ones, simply because they hang around.
The distinction between stable and unstable structures often comes down to the presence of forces favouring convergence on a stable state. You give another excellent example of convergent processes in the same issue: the spontaneous emergence of waterfalls on smooth terrain (23 March, p 20).
As your feature points out, an emerging stable structure then serves as a platform on which further structures can establish themselves. This is a bridge between the simple, spontaneous formation of convection currents and self-catalysing chemical reactions, and the more complex structures of even the simplest of living organisms.
When order arises and when it fights back (2)
I am glad that the Gaia hypothesis is being revisited, as it can explain a lot. If the planet is seeking stability, human activities such as rising carbon dioxide levels and pollution of the oceans challenge this. As a result of climate change, we now have floods, fires and the spread of disease, all of which decrease the number of humans. Is the planet thus regaining some stability?
Diet guideline confusion clings on in our cups
Tony Green notes that according to his kettle, the cup he uses for coffee holds two cups, but his coffee maker thinks it is three (Letters, 2 March). You report that the UK's National Health Service recommends servings of 80 grams. A standard US serving of , vegetables, meat and fish is 4 ounces, which is 112 grams. Does this make you all slimmer than us Americans? It makes the difference between a recommendation of five cups per day and one of four per day.
Does the polluter pay for cleaning up space junk?
Madeleine Finlay reports some clean-up solutions for space debris (30 March, p 26). Who will pay for this? Does the “polluter pays” principle apply in space?
I suspect that any clean-up attempts will be funded by national governments, and therefore by you and me. But what about privately funded space missions? How can the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk be made to contribute to the efforts? A surcharge on the price of unconscionable joyrides into space for the very rich may work, but how much, payable to whom?
How will timber resist fire and pestilence?
Two questions come to mind on the use of cross-laminated timber (CLT) in buildings (16 March, p 33). Does it burn well? And do termites eat it?
The editor writes:
• Tests by the US Forest Service show CLT resisting fire and indeed blasts (). Early work suggests that it is susceptible to termites ().
More on the hunt for black leopards
Nick Blackstock reports seeing black leopards in Kenya in 1956 (Letters, 30 March). I worked in that country during the early 1960s with Gurner van Someren, a member of a noted East African family of naturalists, who in the 1940s sought to prove that black leopards were a separate species. In his role as , he had contacts with hunters, from whom he tried to buy leopard skins – provided they came with the skull to show anatomical differences. He was offered many pelts, but no skulls and hence no proof of a new species.
Another interpretation of the Copenhagen view
Richard Webb gives the pragmatic version of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics: that it isn't about what is really happening at the unseen, microscopic level, but simply a prescription to calculate observational effects (23 March, p 28). But it is more profound than that. It doesn't say that you can't know the position and momentum of a particle at the same time, it says that the particle doesn't have a position and a momentum at the same time.
Reality at the quantum level is relative to the situation set up in the human-scale world. Set up one situation and you get a stream of particles. Set up a different and exclusive situation and what exists is waves as in a continuous medium. Werner Heisenberg suggested in that, so long as a quantum system is isolated, it lacks the realness we are used to at our level. Coming into contact with the outside world, it becomes real in our familiar sense.
When exactly this happens is a matter of the skill of the physicist keeping the system from contact with anything. But it is bound to have happened when you reach the level of a cat, let alone humans and their friends in labs.
Dicing with death among secret seamounts
You report the discovery of 5000 to 10,000 underwater mountains (23 March, p 8). Just think of all the submarines carrying nuclear weapons that were cruising the oceans using incorrect charts…
The editor writes:
• An issue in oceanography is the amount of research kept secret to conceal the capabilities of such submarines. We don't know whether they can operate at the depths of the seamounts' peaks.
For the record 鈥� 27 April 2019
鈥� The proof of the efficiency of a new method of multiplication works only for numbers with more than 10 to the power of 200 trillion trillion trillion digits (6 April, p 12).