Letters

Maddox on madness
24th March 2005
When you read a book review, you expect a discussion which will help you decide whether to read the book. You also expect to be able to divine the critic's bias and allow for it. Neither of these expectations was met by Brenda Maddox's odd review (April) of Adam Phillips's Going Sane.
The book is dismissed in the first four of Maddox's 19 paragraphs. We are told that she objects to Phillips's use of the pronoun "we," that he likes to make statements ex cathedra, that he finds insanity can make for exciting art and that he is striving for a new definition of sanity which Maddox finds unexciting. As for bias, this is also impossible to determine, because from paragraph three on the review is entirely about Maddox herself. We learn that she knows about Francis Crick, has read Antonio Damasio as well as Steven Rose, and has seen a new unpublished book by Lewis Wolpert. All of these are relevant to the science of the brain, not that of the mind, which, to judge from the title of his book, is Phillips's concern. True, Maddox mentions Freud and a tantalising allusion to "new theories of the causation of behaviour." We are also told that she has written about Ernest Jones. But most significantly, she confides that she herself has undergone psychoanalysis. Is it this which qualifies her to opine on "going sane"?
Euan Hill
Tunbridge Wells

Minimising misery
17th March 2005
When I first encountered Richard Layard (March) several decades ago, I tried to persuade him that the appropriate standpoint for rich, developed countries was the worldview of "old money." The point of having enough money is that you do not have to concentrate on making more; other aims become more important or interesting. In a youthful flush of a superior brand of social realism, he would have none of that. It is delightful that he has not only now seen the point, but has put it across with his usual clarity.
More fundamentally, Bentham's great maxim is a better guide to policy if you change the sign. "To minimise the miseries of the maximum number" brings in the thoughts that there are many kinds and many intensities of misery to alleviate. Equally importantly, it leaves groups, families and individuals untrammelled in choosing the satisfactions and types of happiness they seek. It seems to me bad manners even to imply that we can choose other people's forms of happiness for them.
David Heigham
Madrid

Broks's paradox 1
25th March 2005
Paul Broks (April) describes teleportation thus: "A scanner records the states of your body in atomic detail and digitally encodes the information for radio transmission."
Sorry, but you can't do this. Atoms may have some common properties, but their quantum state is unique. To encode the "state" of a single atom would take an infinite amount of information. That's not my opinion, but a fundamental feature of reality known since the time of Heisenberg 80 years ago.
You may be interested to know that you can perform teleportation of a quantum state. But you must use a pair of atoms—one would be on Mars and the other used in a destructive measurement process of the transportee. These atoms must be kept in a superimposed state until the transport is complete, and the transport process destroys the quantum state of the original copy.
Alastair Hewitt
Cambridge, Mass

Broks's paradox 2
20th March 2005
In his latest column, Paul Broks states Broks's paradox: the condition of believing that the mind is separate from the body even though you know it to be untrue.
Actually, he does not know that this belief is untrue. He believes it to be untrue. A respectable body of scientific opinion considers that the brain may act more as a receiver of consciousness rather than its producer. Neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick and his colleague Sam Parnia are carrying out a prospective investigation of out of body experiences in seriously ill patients.
Broks sees broken brains and the effect this has on personality and perception. But maybe what he is seeing is a breakdown in some form of two-way communication between consciousness and its physical embodiment.
The hard problem of consciousness remains: there is nothing in our current scientific understanding that explains what consciousness, and hence our identity, really is. Furthermore, we don't really understand the nature of time. And as physicists tell us, time and space are the same, so we obviously don't understand the nature of space either. So we don't know who we are, where we are or when we are—and neither does Broks. I call this "Rubenstein's paradox."
Ian Rubenstein
Enfield

British identity 1
20th March 2005
It was surprising to see no reference in the Britishness roundtable (April) to New Labour's actual moves to tackle citizenship issues. David Lammy's concerns about street values are important. The "bling bling" culture and rabid consumerism of the inner city are pervasive. In February it was brought into focus by the Ikea riot in north London. When people start fighting over cheap furniture, something is up.
However, on the bigger constitutional and identity issues, there is much that New Labour has already attempted. These initiatives have largely been the work of David Blunkett, whose recent utterances on Englishness are rooted in long-standing concerns. As education secretary, his concerns led to citizenship in schools becoming compulsory. When he moved to the home office, he took with him both his concerns and his adviser, Bernard Crick. The result has been an important string of initiatives and three major reports—"Education for Citizenship" (1998), "The New and the Old" (2003, which led to the ceremony of naturalisation), and "Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship" (2004). All should be required reading for anyone interested in this debate.
Trevor Fisher
Stafford

British identity 2
19th March 2005
Your debate on national values ignored the most distinctive feature of our identity: inventiveness. We all know that it was British engineering and gumption—railways, steamships, trading networks—that were largely responsible for creating the modern globalised world. We all know that far from exhausting the frontier or running out of possibilities for growth, the 20th century opened up a far vaster frontier starting a mere 60 miles above our heads. It should be obvious that further growth and progress entail using the endless natural resources of space—starting with large-scale satellite-based solar power. Yet so far the only British astronaut to wear the union jack in space was the briefest of guests on the Russian space station. Can you imagine how British history might have turned out if Francis Drake had only been able to accomplish his epic global circumnavigation of 1577-80 as a passenger on a Spanish galleon?
It gets worse. A year ago we watched Britain's first Mars probe disappear from sight with little more than a collective shrug. And a few months before that, we scrapped the world's only supersonic airliner without so much as a whisper about building a successor.
If modern Britain shrivels into a province of bureaucratic Europe—still endlessly debating feelings and values, our eyes tight shut against the meaning of our history and the universe that surrounds us—it will be no more than we deserve.
Stephen Ashworth
Oxford

Digital certificates
8th March 2005
David Birch's article (March) raised many interesting points about how an ID card could be used to enable the delivery of services to a user. But he failed to address one significant point: what sort of demand would there be for digital certificates? The government has been trying to build a digital certificate infrastructure for a number of years. It has not really worked because of the difficulties over agreeing who could use it and what it could be used for, to say nothing of the problems in reconciling different sources of data. This may change with the ID card, but it does not mean that we need digital certificates. I can gain access to my bank account and make transactions with a basic level of authentification which doesn't require a digital certificate. How many government services are more sensitive than this?
Charles Osborn
Twickenham

Orchestrated bias
8th April 2005
Stephen Everson (March) states that we have two main orchestras in London: the LSO and the Philharmonia. These are undoubtedly world class, but we have three other prestigious orchestras: the LPO, the RPO and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Everson gives no justification for his personal judgement. As a musician, I am well aware of the dangers of questioning a music critic's personal views. But if Everson wants to play this sort of game, he should, in fairness to his readers and the musicians concerned, make clear his reasons for condemning to a lower division what many other experts consider first-rate orchestras.
It is also slightly worrying that Everson, in the April issue, pre-judged the quality of the Brahms cycle of the Philharmonia with Charles Mackerras. While it is good to get press interest pointing enthusiastically towards major events such as this, it is somewhat presumptuous to be so utterly convinced of its performance merits before it has taken place. Arousing a sense of anticipation is one thing; arriving at a concert with a mind that has already decided on its excellence, or otherwise, is another.
Roger Harvey
BBC Symphony Orchestra