John Carpenter’s “Planaria”: Or, the New Individualism
rifters.com
rifters.com
Also, importantly, he published part of his work, including full books, for free in multiple electronic formats, here [0].
Refs:
If you like Blindsight, you’ll probably want to continue with the sidequel, Echopraxia. You can also find them bundled together under the name Firefall.
And I think out of his main works, Blindsight is probably the most accessible. It also led me to Thomas Metzinger’s “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self” [2], which Watts used as a source material in his research and had good things to say about.
The Rifters series is great, too, but there’s a sort of darkness or heaviness to it that may not work for everyone.
And bonus content, a fan made short movie based on Blindsight, here: [3].
I hope this helps. :)
Links:
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)
[1]: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
Books can do that. Like, read Tom Robbins and you'll fall in love with the next person you see. Read Peter Watts and you'll spend the next four years looking at the person next to you like they're an alien who's plotting to lay eggs in you without themselves even knowing it.
I think I was always part of this category of people without even realizing, until I read Peter Watts’ books, and in particular Blindsight.
I read hard SF, and I enjoy the genre greatly. But most of it just lacks something that is hard to pinpoint. It’s both something about human psychology, and where the case, especially about the aliens. Not Blindsight, tho. Not at all.
Btw, there’s another hard SF author that I have a huge appreciation for: Ken MacLeod. His style is different, but in my opinion he gets things right too. Some of his books I read multiple times too, and I really don’t do that often, having limited time for reading and being rather picky about what I read.
Can absolutely see someone being part of that group before reading/realizing though, Watts/Blindsight is so different but almost “natural”. I used to think it was its unrelenting emphasis on competition, but there’s absolutely more to it as you say in its treatment of psychology, consciousness, alien/different life
I’ve never read Ken Macleod but I’m happy to look into him now, can’t remember ever being disappointed in recommendations given off the back of Blindsight!
For quick recommendations, I'd single out two of his short stories (which are two of my favorite stories in general):
The 21 Second God - https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=5968 Malak - https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Malak.pdf
Edit: I always forget HN doesn't use markdown.
I do need to reread Echopraxia though, and perhaps my opinion will change after that. Blindsight was brilliant enough that it deserves the extra effort to appreciate.
Not sure that I like Blindsight even though I think it a great book. The same goes for some of his other books; deeply unsettling
It's not for everyone though, I tried to get friends and family to read it, I don't think a single one got through it.
You pretty much need Wikipedia open to make sense of it and meditate on chapters. It's a challenging read.
Blindsight worth reading indeed, depiction of scary aliens is excellent there, Echopraxia is completely disappointing disaster movie in the print form. I'm going to point you at The Island novelette and whole Sunflowers series if you can endure its decadent dark set&setting.
"a living system maintaining both a higher level of internal cooperation and a lower level of internal conflict than either its components or any larger systems of which it is a component."
So say there exists some form of higher-level individual that where we can be considered as components. Does its existence suddenly revoke our individual-ness? I don't see why that should be, why it has to be exclusive. The flatworm and the neoblasts can be individuals at the same time.
...But then the definition is meaningless. It'd be great to make it weaker without breaking it, so to say
A far out way of considering it is in the context of greater humanity and the various pesky problems within it like anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, child deaths due to malnutrition, war, lack of genuine (non-illusory) empathy, etc.
The idea of "human nature"—good and evil—makes a hell of a lot more sense if you think of humans as a colony species where each tribe is a single individual competing against others.
It's not so much that humans are uniformly capable of both good and evil. It's that what we deem "good" is mostly how we treat our own tribe and what we call "evil" is how we treat others. It's like trying to decide if an arm mostly good or mostly evil because it washes its own body and strikes other people. Those actions are fundamentally different—on incompatible moral levels—because the former is done to the arm's own organism and the latter to another.
It may not even be meaningful to try to aggregate how we behave to our in-group and how we behave towards our out-group into any unified metric.
I find that from this perspective, all the pieces start to fit together the more you think of it. Not only does what we are living through increasingly make sense, after a while it starts to seem logically inevitable (under present conditions, that is).
And once you spend sufficient time on this phase, ideas might start falling out of the sky on how to plausibly rectify the situation.
Philosophy has long held (though not without dispute, of course!) that the world is ontologically divided into 'natural kinds' that have metaphysical significance, but I side with the view that ontologies are merely useful tools in epistemology, subject to modification and qualification as our knowledge increases, and useful in some contexts but not necessarily all. Nothing breaks if we talk about neoblasts being "in a sense" individuals, while also talking about planaria being "in a sense" individuals, so long as it is either obvious, or we make clear, in what sense we mean.
There is quite a continuum here: for example, slime molds are even less aggregated entities than planaria. And then there is the aphorism "a chicken is an egg's way of making more eggs."
Mary Lou Jepsen at Openwater talked about her team’s efforts to create that tech in a Long Now Foundation talk back in 2018
https://longnow.org/seminars/02018/oct/29/toward-practical-t...
This is incoherent. How can knowledge even exist if there are no natural kinds? What exactly would you be knowing in their absence? One can be mistaken about a particular predication, but knowledge isn't even possible if you deny the reality of natural kinds. Knowledge presupposes universals and universals presuppose natural kinds. I don't even know what is useful about natural kinds if they don't exist. How could you even talk about usefulness in their absence? You've denied the very possibility of even having a measure of usefulness!
You seem to be taking a vaguely Kantian view of the world, except that you've gone further by denying that the categories of the mind are fixed AND that noumena are real. Kant himself is incoherent. If noumena are unknowable and all we have are phenomena and some mental schemata, then why posit noumena in the first place? What's the justification? In your case, how would you even make the claim you've made?
Look at this statement: "I think the fact that we are self-aware makes it difficult (in the "it's not helpful" sense) to revoke our individuality if we participate in something bigger than ourselves." Putting aside the revolting notion of revoking my individuality like some collectivist (sorry, I'm a person, I have individuality, thanks), who is "we"? Wouldn't that denote at least suggest a genus, if not a species? That's just the beginning. Even if we accept that science reifies some things (which it does; science is to a large degree instrumentalist, but I know that only because I am capable of theoretical knowledge), that still presumes the existence of natural kinds and a broader capacity to know them. Science just becomes a way of organizing data for practical purposes (like laws that classify shellfish as fruit or whatever) and less a theoretical enterprise interested in knowing things as they actually are.
The only workable solution is one that assumes the mind can know reality in principle. It can make mistakes, it can be in error, but it is capable of knowing. Skepticism is unworkable and nothing is worse than a kind of domesticated, halfway house skepticism that fails to notice the non-skeptical baggage that's being smuggled in through the backdoor to produce this half-hearted in-between. Either accept that knowledge is possible, or accept insanity. You cannot coherently straddle both.
What happens in practice, of course, is that we propose that the world is a certain way based on our experiences so far, without being hung up on the question of whether we have truly identified the real 'natural kinds' and are talking about them. We seek to validate, or refute, extend and/or replace these opinions, through further study of the world, in a process that is the opposite of the skepticism that you seem to think my position implies.
If you find it helpful to think that 'natural kind' is a natural kind, then go ahead, but the fact that you know something about the world (a premise I am not disputing) does not make your assumption about natural kinds a metaphysical necessity and a prerequisite for knowledge. After all, we have, over the millennia, held many now demonstrably-false ideas about what sort of things there are in the world, yet that has not prevented us from learning more.
One other thing: you wrote "putting aside the revolting notion of revoking my individuality like some collectivist..." Firstly, note how you are presenting an emotional reaction as if it were an argument. Secondly, if you had paid attention to my previous post, you would have seen that I am arguing that our individuality should not be put aside on account of the arguments in the article. Before you start bandying words like "incoherent" and "insanity", you should be a little more careful with your own arguments.
[1] https://iep.utm.edu/nat-kind/ [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/#MetNatKin
2. The problem with your approach is that people instantaneously leap from "capable of knowing" to "knowing", and they do this all the time.
So anything that reminds you that you are definitely wrong is a useful tool, just as ontologies are helpful tools (and wrong).
3. "genus" does not exist. "species" does not exist. "clade" could exist in limited cases but is inevitably incomplete. (Consider that you are pointing at creatures and their offspring without thinking about their microbiomes, among other things.)
That an outside entity possessing such a perspective would look upon us in a fashion not unlike how we would look at individual ants or bees in a hive.
Those animals don’t have the capacity to perceive our self awareness with the tools they have, perhaps more base motivations but never understanding more than our actions. How would we look upon a creature so much more expansive than ourselves? Would widespread cthonian-esque cosmic horror unfold among our kind, coupled to cultism and deification?
Much like the interpretation of the Thing from the alien perspective linked on the source article. It’s understanding of the universe is so profoundly different to ours that it is horrified by us.
Separately, I think the idea of degrees of naturalness of a concept seems to make sense?
See also the work that Levin's lab is doing, e.g.: "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg and "xenobots": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobot https://cdorgs.github.io/ and "Growing Neural Cellular Automata, Differentiable Model of Morphogenesis" https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/
Also check out Trichoplax adhaerens, an organism on the cusp between single-celled and multicellular lifeforms:
> Trichoplax are very flat organisms around a millimetre in diameter, lacking any organs or internal structures. They have two cellular layers: the top epitheloid layer is made of ciliated "cover cells" flattened toward the outside of the organism, and the bottom layer is made up of cylinder cells that possess cilia used in locomotion, and gland cells that lack cilia.[2] Between these layers is the fibre syncytium, a liquid-filled cavity strutted open by star-like fibres.
> On both sides of the septa [fibre syncytium?] are liquid-filled capsules that cause the septa to resemble synapses, i.e. nerve-cell junctions that occur in fully expressed form only in animals with tissues (Eumetazoa). Striking accumulations of calcium ions, which may have a function related to the propagation of stimuli, likewise suggest a possible role as protosynapses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax
You can push a trichoplax through a sieve that forces the individual cells to split apart and they will crawl around independently and reform the organism. You can dye two trichoplax different colors, split them, put the cells near each other, and the cells will form a single "piebald" organism together.
> It is also possible to rub Trichoplax adhaerens through a strainer in such a manner that individual cells are not destroyed but are separated from one another to a large extent. In the test tube they then find their way back together again to form complete organisms. If this procedure is performed on several previously strained individuals simultaneously, the same thing occurs. In this case, however, cells that previously belonged to a particular individual can suddenly show up as part of another.
> Planarians ... [a]re not exactly worms. They’re not even individuals. What they are is habitats: cellular substrates containing individuals. Individuals who may not even like each other very much
An explanation cannot undermine the fact it tries to explain without ceasing to be an explanation.