The Top Science News

How well our friends know our personality; the precursory phase of large earthquakes; the case for unproctored online exams; and more. Plus: consciousness is in your head. I consulted Einstein. [View in browser]( | [Join Nautilus]( July 25, 2023   Did a friend forward this? [Register here](. This Tuesday, your FREE member newsletter includes the week’s top science news—plus one full story, below, from The Porthole, our section for short sharp looks at science. Enjoy!   DISCOVERIES The Top Science News This Week   [Friends Know Us Even When They Are Different From Us: Accuracy and Bias in Self–Other Perceptions of the Big Five]( How accurately can you and your friend perceive one another’s personality? [Journal of Individual Differences→](   [The Precursory Phase of Large Earthquakes]( Hints of incoming big quakes hide in GPS data. [Science→](   [The Fructose Survival Hypothesis for Obesity]( This idea explains the origins for a lot more ailments than just being severely overweight. [Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B→](   [Unproctored Online Exams Provide Meaningful Assessment of Student Learning]( Teachers shouldn’t worry about students taking tests alone at home. [PNAS→](   [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge]( AIs perform “encouragingly” on answering medical questions but remain inferior to human physicians. [Nature→](   [The Ethico-Political Universe of ChatGPT]( “The very attempt to give ChatGPT an ethical keel has also given it a measurably left position in the political space and a concomitant position in social space among the privileged.” [Journal of Social Computing→](   [The Massive Relic Galaxy NGC 1277 Is Dark Matter Deficient]( How does a galaxy go without any dark matter? [Astronomy & Astrophysics→](   [How Christianity Conquered Rome Through Simple Math]( Divine intervention not required. [Big Think→]( Experience the endless possibilities and deep human connections that science offers [JOIN TODAY](   Join the F3 Krill Replacement Challenge In [Future of Fish Feed]('s newest aquaculture feed contest, 10 companies will compete for $100,000 by developing the best krill replacement. Registration is open until August 31, 2023. [Join the race]( to replace krill in aquaculture feeds. [REGISTER TODAY](   From The Porthole: short sharp looks at science   PHILOSOPHY Consciousness Is In Your Head. I Consulted Einstein How the theory of relativity explains our minds. BY NEIL SINHABABU   Thanks to Einstein, we know one thing about consciousness: It’s inside your head. “Inside” is meant literally here. If you’re in Dallas wearing a hat, your consciousness is in Dallas, under your hat. In a new [paper]( (forthcoming in Synthese) I argue that Einstein’s theory of relativity shows that qualia, the elements of subjective experience, must be in the same place as their neural correlates, the brain events constituting or immediately causing them (which scientists have not yet identified). It goes like this: 1. If something shares a time with a physical event in all reference frames, it shares that physical event’s location. 2. Qualia share times with their correlates in all reference frames. 3. Therefore, qualia share their correlates’ locations. Einstein discovered that motion affects the times at which things happen in your reference frame, or your location in spacetime. Moving toward things makes them happen earlier. Moving away makes them happen later. These effects are significant only if you move at near the speed of light. [Like the story? Join Nautilus today]( If we’re side by side, and you’re moving near lightspeed while I’m standing still, events ahead will happen earlier for you than for me. If lightning bolts strike ahead and behind simultaneously in my reference frame, the one ahead will strike earlier in your reference frame and the one behind will strike later. They’re in different places, so you can move toward one and away from another, making them not simultaneous for you like they are for me. But when two events happen simultaneously in the same place, it’s impossible to move toward one and away from the other. This ensures simultaneity in all reference frames. If you’re in Dallas wearing a hat, your consciousness is in Dallas, under your hat. There can be no delay between correlates and qualia, because correlates either cause or constitute qualia. If neural correlates of consciousness are the last causal step before nonphysical qualia, as many dualists claim, they must produce qualia simultaneously or instantaneously. That’s how all causes we observe work. Whenever causes take time to have effects, an intermediate chain of steps occupies all the time in between. Hearing a song yesterday can cause me to buy the album tomorrow, but only by affecting my brain throughout the intervening period. And if neural correlates simply are qualia, as physicalists usually claim, they’re the same and must arise at the same time. Because there is no delay between neural correlates and qualia, they must share spatial locations. If my correlates caused qualia somewhere else, you could make my qualia occur earlier than my correlates in your reference frame by moving from my correlates toward my qualia. This would be backwards causation! Relativity never allows the causal order in one reference frame to be reversed in another. It therefore requires qualia and correlates to share locations. Qualia are with their correlates, rather than being nowhere or in a weird place. Location-sharing may come as a surprise to dualists, who hold that qualia and neural correlates are two different things. But it helps make their theory more scientific and less magical. If qualia were nowhere or far away from their correlates, our brains would have to instantaneously cause things nowhere or far away. (If correlates are quantum-level entities, they might be able to cause things far away, but there is currently insufficient evidence for these hypotheses about correlates and quantum causation.) Contemporary physics has [found]( 17 types of fundamental particles in space. All these particles exert their causal force locally, rather than at a distance. Location-sharing ensures that qualia will follow the same causal rules—the laws of particle physics—as everything else in space. Discovering the physical nature of qualia would be a great explanatory triumph. But if we can’t do it, we might have to posit dualist qualia, separate from neural correlates. Location-sharing puts qualia where science wants them, whatever their nature may be. Lead image: spatuletail / Shutterstock More from The Porthole: • [Bummer: Popular happiness strategies are a bust]( • [The shiniest planet has clouds of metal and glass](   P.S. The English chemist Rosalind Franklin, whose work was critical to deciphering the nature of DNA, was born on this day in 1920. Kevin Berger wrote about Franklin’s tireless work as reported in The Secret of Life: Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick, and the Discovery of DNA's Double Helix, a recent book by Howard Markel, who Berger interviewed. He asked Markel to explain how Watson and Crick egregiously buried Franklin’s role in cracking life’s biological code. Simple: [“They wanted to control history by telling their story.”]( P.P.S. The last note stated theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg died in 2012. The correct year is 2021. I regret the error.   Today’s newsletter was written by Brian Gallagher   GIVEAWAY [Enter To Win a Signed Copy of John Vaillant’s Fire Weather]( In 2023 alone, 27,715 wildfires have consumed 793,198 acres in the US, and Canada has lost 10.93 million acres to the flames. Due to climate change, these staggering numbers will only continue to rise. Acclaimed author John Vaillant recently shared his thoughts about the speed and destructive power of 21-century wildfires in [his original op-ed for Nautilus](. In his international bestseller, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, Vaillant shares his captivating account of the May 2016 fire that engulfed the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta, displacing 88,000 people. Read Vaillant’s sprawling narratives and potent warnings about wildfires by entering to win one of 10 signed copies of this riveting book. 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