And, Ben, does it not make you questions something or other if notable scientists, having spent their lives thinking hard and within the scientific paradigm, come up with the kind of ideas you felt it pertinent to diss in your column? People working on higher mathematics regularly come out with similarly ‘weird’ takes on reality. If these people, with their proven ‘non-weird’ track records and decades of thought and scientific enquiry behind them, come to certain conclusions, who are you to dismiss them so summarily? Please not that I am not saying I agree with their thinking – I plainly don’t know enough about it to have a qualified opinion. But I know enough to recognise a prejudiced view.

The tone of the article seems unscientific. Merely to stick the adjective weird in front of something does not justify excluding it from scientific discussion. Quantum theory is not a weird peripheral thing but one of the two theories on which our understanding of the physical universe is based.

The oft trundled out argument that its too convenient to kill two weird birds with one scientific stone is similarly not a scientific argument. Only processes of observation and experiment can show whether or not there is a connection between the quantum level and consciousness..