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In his article "Unlocking consciousness", George Musser describes the structuralist model of conscious experience. However, he misunderstands the nature of the "hard problem" in the philosophical theory of mind – how subjective experience arises. He assumes that, by developing a structuralist model, "science will be able to explain experience after all – and the hard …

To put Stone Age seafarers into perspective, we should remember that we are looking at a vast timespan. Even individual events that may seem unlikely are likely to have happened many times over hundreds of thousands of years. Also, in our cosseted, long lives, we have become very risk-averse, but the Stone Age human, living …

I read with great interest the interview with Michael Pollan, but was struck by a notable omission. He suggests we may need "a kind of science" capable of incorporating first-person experience into our understanding of consciousness. Yet disciplines such as psychoanalysis have been working precisely in this space for over a century, building on much …

Chris Stokel-Walker's article about AI data centres warming surrounding land was very interesting. In the UK, a company has piloted using this heat to warm swimming pools. A local park in Edinburgh has installed an Archimedes screw in a nearby weir to generate electricity for their centre. Ben Cruachan, a so-called Hollow Mountain in Scotland, …

The article on grapefruit losing their bitterness seems to be closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Over the seven decades that I have had half a grapefruit as the starter for my breakfast, the flavour has been getting sweeter and sweeter. And "white grapefruit", the sharper variety, are now impossible to obtain …

I found the article on mental imagery training very interesting. As described, I don't have very good mental imagery, but my spatial imagery is better than many people who do. I can also imagine myself moving my limbs and body, which may be related, but presumably also involves proprioception, and is extremely useful for learning …

There's nothing "radical" about the notion that "the cosmos is stitched together from interlocking perspectives" ( 21 March, p 28 ). Each of us views the world from a unique (relative) perspective, builds limited models of our environments and acts accordingly to sustain ourselves, shaping reality around us. When we think and work together, we …

Jo Marchant's article on QBism and enactivism suggests the state of the universe is refined through the process of observation or perception. A previous letter about building a simulation of the universe noted that if you were to do so and had limited resources, you would refine details of the model only as and when …

On the question of whether AI understands that nuclear war is to be avoided, I would say yes – depending on how it has been programmed ( 7 March, p 11 ). To explore the restrictions that large language models might have imposed on them, I asked ChatGPT a series of questions about the construction …

The World's Largest Collection of the World's Smallest Versions of the World's Largest Things is located in Kansas (11 April, p 48).