We need to teach and promote the joy of failure
Your review of the exhibition reminded me of finding Stephen Pile's wonderful 1979 tome The Book of Heroic Failures (9 November, p 31). Its guiding principle was that anyone can succeed, but it takes genius to fail in spectacular ways. The notion that great success can come from great failure sparks much discussion among educators. Our educational systems fail, at all levels, to teach students how to fail and about the resilience to learn and recover from failure.
It is great that our pedagogy emphasises students' success. But it seemingly does so at a cost: the creation of learners who are less tolerant of risk and, therefore, of innovation. We need more work on the joys of failure.
Belief in an afterlife does not follow our usual logic (1)
Graham Lawton explains in a clear and logical fashion why people believe in the afterlife (23 November, p 40). But he overlooks the fact that many people don’t think logically or clearly, at least from a scientific point of view.
One reason why people believe in life after death is because they really, really want it to exist. It means that although their loved ones may have died, they haven’t disappeared forever and there is a chance of being reunited with them eventually. This is an incredibly powerful incentive to believe in an afterlife.
Lawton suggests that people don’t believe in non-existence because they have trouble imagining it. I think the problem is that many can imagine it very well indeed. This fear of disappearing further encourages them to embrace the idea of life after death. We see many instances in the modern world, from climate change denialism to homeopathic remedies, of people not valuing scientific logic and preferring the more “human” logic of narrative and intuition 鈥� particularly when it gives them a happy ending.
Belief in an afterlife does not follow our usual logic (2)
As a neuroscientist who identifies the concept of “me” with a subset of the complex activities in my all-too-mortal brain, I have no problem accepting the notion of “not-being” after my death. As a former embryology teacher, I also had to consider the conundrum, which Lawton mentions in passing, of my “not-being” for aeons before my conception, “being” at some point and, later still, “becoming aware of being”.
Most of us spend large parts of every night in a state of “not-being” and only discover it when morning comes. When I had open-heart surgery a few years ago, the entity that I refer to as “me” failed to exist for rather longer, but reappeared right on cue in the recovery ward. You have to wake up to know you were asleep, and there would have to be an afterlife for you to find out that there isn’t. Lawton’s remark that “you’ll find out sooner or later” is exactly what won’t happen.
We need to do the right thing for any reason at all
We still have to do everything, immediately, to fix climate change, says Graham Lawton, but at least we aren't doing nothing (9 November, p 22). The other day, I drifted into a casual discussion about climate change with a friend who turned out to be a denier. It demonstrated that neither of us had any idea what to say. The rather gormless polarisation we lurched into was a microcosm of the wider debate.
Reason demands another way. I think everyone would agree that we are the only species that fouls its own nest so appallingly. We cannot continue to relentlessly expel our many wastes into the air and the sea and across the land without expecting some kind of dire consequence for our children. Recycle and conserve to prevent this, even if you don't believe in climate change. Better to do the right thing for a different reason than do nothing – or, worse, stand in the way.
Survival on our Titanic demands steering
Fred White likens the climate crisis to an iceberg towards which we, like the Titanic, are heading (Letters, 23 November). To extend this metaphor: we are metres away from that iceberg and the ship's wheel is broken. For every positive step we take to limit emissions, we slither backwards by electing a Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro.
Our only hope is for developed countries to get together and throw resources at finding ways to remove greenhouse gases.
For the record 鈥� 21/28 December 2019
鈥� When an atom of the hydrogen isotope tritium decays, it emits an electron and an anti-neutrino (30 November, p 10).