51¶¯Âþ

I think Mark Pickin is wrong to conclude that Stone Age seafarers wouldn't venture out to sea unless they could see indications of land ahead. Stone Age Polynesians travelled thousands of miles between islands, navigating by wave patterns and other means. Similarly, early Viking seafarers are known to have found Iceland, Greenland and later the …

In his article "Do aliens do physics?", Daniel Whiteson speculates that "other species might build technologies without developing anything recognisable as physics". Perhaps our fellow terrestrial species that also don't ask "why" demonstrate this using the bedrock of physics: mathematics ( 14 March, p 42 ). For example, honey bees use a "waggle dance" to …

Your article and the many letters on solving the mystery of Stone Age seafarers take a rationalist approach to the discovery of Malta from Sicily. Accident and emotion are at least as likely explanations. Stone Age fishers plying coastal waters off Sicily would have occasionally been caught in storms and blown out to sea. Survivors …

Regarding David Robson's piece, "Why are we so suspicious of do-gooders?", in terms of evolutionary theory, altruism increases biological fitness if the cost of altruism is less than the benefit to my relatives, where the currency of cost and benefit is measured in terms of the future spread of my genes in the population. This …

It isn't surprising that an AI might recommend nuclear strikes when faced with the prospect of losing a war regardless of the ethical and moral ramifications. Without a soul, and without the ability to internalise the horror and revulsion resulting from the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of course an AI could consider using …

Of course AIs don't hesitate to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games. A machine doesn't know fear and has no idea what this world is. So it is natural for it to opt for any weapon that is present in the game. It's only following the rules, right?

The piece on hominid hand structure is fascinating and shows the evolutionary importance of the development of hands. Jacob Bronowski, in his book The Ascent of Man, captures this well with the sentence: "The hand is the cutting edge of the mind ( 21 February, p 32)

"In the eyes of the beholders" is one of the best articles that I have read in 51¶¯Âþ . And, because it mentions information often, I am moved to write that the Greeks had at least two words for knowledge: doxa and gnosis . Through doxa , we come to conclusions based upon information. …

Your article on "the pluriverse" was interesting, but I'm not convinced. In particular, if Qbists and enactivists propose that the universe arises as a result of all the living or agentic observers in it, the question then is: what was going on before there were any? The article hints at extending the scope of agency …

Once again, the so-called hard problem of human consciousness raises its head in the piece "Unlocking consciousness". But is there really a problem? Can we really say that a dog or an ape is not conscious in the way humans are? They feel fear, affection and grief, just as we do ( 28 March, p …