We still lack a fundamental explanation for morality
Webb Keane’s anthropological account of morality in his book Animals, Robots, Gods encounters the familiar problem experienced by reductive explanations of the moral faculty. However sophisticated the concepts deployed, morality is explained away as essentially a social construct, a matter of social conditioning. I am given no reason, ultimately, why I must do the right thing, why I must not pursue my interests at the expense of others. What truly lies at the heart of the moral sense is unaccounted for (31 August, p 28).
Exploring the latest mystery of Stonehenge (1)
While I remain in awe of the detective work that has gone into suggesting a Scottish origin for the altar stone at Stonehenge’s centre, I remain dumbfounded by the belief that it was human agency that brought it there (24 August, p 16).
Surely a far more believable story is that the stone was there anyway somehow and our Bronze Age ancestors recognised its difference 鈥� its strangeness 鈥� and therefore its possible potency, so began using it as a spiritual focus? The construction of Stonehenge around it followed from this.
Exploring the latest mystery of Stonehenge (2)
Acquiring objects from abroad, particularly if they have cultural significance, is something humans like to do. Stones, whether gems or edifices, are particularly popular.
Might the altar stone have been acquired in the same way? We now know that it must have come from an area of north-east Scotland. Orkney is at the centre of that area. The Ring of Brodgar on the main island of Orkney is a circle of standing stones that was made by a thriving Neolithic settlement.
That ring was there when Stonehenge was being built, and today it has 20 stones missing. Your article suggests the altar stone would have been brought to Stonehenge by sea: where better to find a craft and a crew to transport it than in an island community?
Exploring the latest mystery of Stonehenge (3)
The altar stone isn’t the only Scottish connection to Stonehenge. Isotopic analysis of pig teeth near Stonehenge found they had been brought from the Orkney islands for feasting.
An engineer's vote for the cynical approach
In engineering, cynicism is a very practical way to approach big challenges. You must assume that anything that can go wrong will go wrong and proceed accordingly. Only after everything that can go wrong has gone wrong and you have cleaned up the mess can you get on with making things go right (17 August, p 36).
Caffeine: great for us, not so good for farms
I was delighted to find that moderate consumption of caffeine is good for Homo sapiens. It may not be for some other species: I was once told of experiments on the use of waste pulp from coffee berry processing as cattle feed in Mexico in the 1970s. Although this was full of apparently useful sugar and protein and was eaten with enthusiasm, the cattle inexplicably failed to gain weight (24 August, p 36).
The problem was solved by an astute student (my informant) who got out of the lab and spent a few days cattle-watching. The test group spent their days excitedly running and jumping, enjoying a caffeine high rather than getting down to the serious business of eating grass.
These financial trades are bad enough already
High-frequency trading already demonstrates that the financial markets are nothing but a shell game profiting only the already ultra-rich and causing misery for the rest when they go off the rails. Making such trading even more volatile with quantum technology will only cause harm (17 August, p 14).
Delving into the maths behind the latest AIs (1)
From
27 July, p 28
Delving into the maths behind the latest AIs (2)
In your review of Anil Ananthaswamy’s book Why Machines Learn, I was astonished to read his statement that the mathematics behind AI is simple, “the kind one learns in high school or early college”.
This may be true of a basic model, but not for ChatGPT, Claude and other neural network-based models, which involve billions of parameters and multiple dimensions. The maths is stochastic probability theory, stochastic calculus and linear algebra often not encountered until the postgraduate level.
Nature will have occupied all the levels of reality
It is fascinating to consider the possibilities of quantum biology, but surely its existence would be no great surprise. It seems to me that nature is already functioning happily at all the “levels” we humans think we can discern, and many more we have yet to identify (10 August, p 18).
Surely molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, the quantum world and the microdynamics of space, etc., are all aspects of one natural system, functioning as a whole, and the various so-called levels are all human constructs 鈥� a useful analysis or a window onto something we don’t fully understand, part of a whole we have yet to comprehend?
A simple solution to food's climate impact
You report the growing impact of emissions from food production on the climate. The only way to avoid this kind of damage is for every person to limit their meat intake to less than 200 grams per week. This is a fraction of what many people now eat. We do need dietary vitamin B12 and animal products are rich in this, but B12 supplements and fortification are plentiful these days (17 August, p 13).
No matter what the agricultural industry says or does, unless we eat far less meat, we will destroy our environment.
For the record
A 100-nanometre glass bead is a thousandth of the width of a human hair (31 August, p 16).
Orkney is in Scotland, off the mainland (24 August, p 47).