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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 …

In your Editor's Pick letter titled "Why esoteric science could be overlooked by aliens", the writer thinks that spacefaring aliens might not know about relativity and quantum mechanics because it is so obscure. I beg to differ ( Letters, 28 March ). It is highly likely that advanced species have satellite navigation systems around their …

A thought arising from Daniel Whiteson's article "Would aliens do physics?" is that aliens with "eyes" different from ours might have different ideas about the aftermath of the big bang. If they could perceive longer, infrared wavelengths of light, what we call the cosmic dark ages wouldn't be dark at all. It would be a …

Question: what's worse than going camping with a theoretical physicist? Answer: trusting your accounts to a cosmologist. Not only will most of your cash go missing, but you'll be assured that all is OK; it's really still there, but has simply been transformed into "dark money" ( Letters, 28 March ).

Adrian Smith's imaginary camper virtually identified themselves as a theoretical physicist by displaying such disdain for proven instructions for erecting their tent. As a young oceanographic researcher at a northern UK university in the 1970s, I developed a novel deterministic climate forecasting methodology. When an even younger professor of theoretical physics arrived, I visited his …