Blindsight by Peter Watts (full novel)
rifters.com
rifters.com
The things unoffical sidequel to The Thing is also very good. http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
He publishes lots (all?) of his books for free using the Creative Commons licence. I pirate most of my shit tbh but after reading two of his trilogies and finding them some of the best books I have read I had to donate: https://rifters.com/real/donation.htm
PD: Minion in the donate page kinda looks like a Petter Watts vampire but im sure he was a bless to have around.
I have not read the Rifter series, is it as good as his other books?
Loved Blindsight, loved the Things, but DNF B-Max.
There's some interesting stuff in there -- if you've previously read the Firefall novels you'll recognize some early versions of ideas and motifs which he develops more fully in the later series -- but ultimately I'd describe it as skippable.
The thing for me is that I absolutely loved reading a book set at the bottom of the ocean in crushing darkness. I'd give Starfish a try unless that sounds horrible to you. While it doesn't get fully resolved, I think it actually comes to a pretty neat ending on its own that gives you room to keep thinking about it (and really, that's true of lots of great literature).
Minor spoilers ahead.
One of the major characters is a vampire. The character is introduced as if everyone knows what a vampire is. And it’s kinda true. Readers probably have some idea what it is. So do characters in the world. But about it turns out vampires in the world are quite different to what a common reader might know. And this gets first explained about third way in the book.
Things get explained eventually but I just got tired being confused all the time. Do I need to remember this thing I’m told? Do I rely on my prior knowledge or do I get a different explanation later? Do I reread past parts when I get those explanations in case I took things wrong?
I see why people are excited about all the ideas in the book but it’s an extremely hard read. I wonder whether people are attached to it mostly because they had to work hard to get through it.
For example, I believe that early on the narrator speaks about his mother 'going to Heaven' - you're supposed to be curious about what exactly that means, since it's clearly not the same way we use the phrase. You're supposed to look forward to the eventual explanation, and to trust that there will be one.
Of course if that explanation never comes, and the detail is critical to the plot, that's a failure of the author. But no different from any other plot hole - that's what reviews are for.
>Of course if that explanation never comes, and the detail is critical to the plot
it's the matrix. Siri's mum ends up in a data centre somewhere with her conscious mind having every whim sated while her unconscious is running vampire Facebook or whatever
The whole book is written from the point of view of the main character in a form similar to a diary. Diegetically it makes sense to not explain everything because the character knows it all already. I kinda like the idea of it but in practice it left me confused most of the time.
I fully admit that it might be just me. I like new ideas and non-linear story telling (e.g. I absolutely love Use of Weapons by Banks). I like when my books make me go "Fuck yeah!" (excited) or "Oh fuck!" (surprised). This one made me go "WTF?" (confused) more than I like.
This requires some degree of trust (or at least indulgence) in the author, but it's a fairly common expositional style in fiction.
The vampires were my favorite part of the book.
[0] https://rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf
Later on it turns out that he had a good reason for including them! They’re included so he could compare and contrast human minds with other types of minds: the really alien (the Scramblers), and the human-ish (the vampires). The whole thing is a neat sci-fi story wrapped around a prolonged meditation on consciousness, which I think is neat (but I can also understand if it isn’t your bag).
The slow introductions to weird ideas is definitely intentional; you're not intended to hold all the clues in your head and piece it together like a mystery.
They have some great fictional speculation on the Internet and how it's chaotic mix of automated agents tearing at each other that really reminds me of what could be possible with the content creation of LLMs.
"In Peter Watts's Rifters Trilogy, which includes "Starfish", "Maelstrom", and "ßehemoth", the internet is a significant theme, especially in its altered, chaotic state. It is described as no longer trustworthy, having been overwhelmed by self-evolving viruses and the descendants of self-evolving anti-viruses that spiraled out of control. In this futuristic setting, the internet has been renamed "Maelstrom" to reflect its chaotic and unpredictable nature, becoming a space that is both electronic and ecological, complete with its own digital ecosystem" - synopsis I ironically used chat gpt to write
However, I think the key idea that consciousness is a local maximum in the universe is fundamentally mistaken, if a cool thought experiment.
The brain is an expensive organ, and unless consciousness is truly pointless, it would be subject to evolutionary pressure like anything else. I doubt it could escape those pressures, even just within earth.
The vampires were cool tho.
Very much agree, on both counts. Even "just" on earth, it's not like the more mechanistic approaches didn't have plenty of chances to compete. The near-instant and very complete domination by the first species to reach a certain level - and its subsequent orders-of-magnitude raising as it then starts to compete mainly with itself - was totally driven by evolution and there's no reason to think it wouldn't happen anywhere else. The only variable I can really see is in where it (evolution-driven intelligence increase) stops.
It's extremely hard to imagine even the basics such as group coordination and complex communication without some sense of self, and even the animals we see on earth with some level of these abilities demonstrate at least a proto-consciousness, which might well have won out in the end had we not been first past the post. There's no reason to think this phenomenon would be an earth-only anomaly.
It reminds of the "million monkeys with a million keyboards" thought experiment. Yes, they will, given infinite time, produce the entire works of shakespeare. But in the real universe they don't have infinite time, the actual shakespeare evolved, wrote it all first, then took over the monkey planet and enslaved or at least repurposed them before they even got the first paragraph out.
I don't mean to suggest that homo sapiens is some kind of universal peak of capability - we are almost certainly not - but I find it pretty much impossible to imagine sentient creatures being outcompeted by non-sentient ones under any circumstances.
It's expensive, sure, but consciousness appears to be a - the - superweapon, and whoeever grasps it first, wins.
I think the idea that intelligence, creativity etc can be totally separate from consciousness is a perfectly valid proposition and certainly relevant to current and future developments in ML, collective intelligence (companies, countries, mobs etc)
I think in reality, separate from the story of the book, that consciousness being a key component in evolving truly intelligent systems from scratch makes a lot of sense. (and probably isnt as "expensive" as the book makes it out to be) I think it also makes sense that you can have non-sentient/unconscious intelligent systems just as intelligent as conscious ones and perhaps more.
If the chinese room gives convincing answers why does it matter one way or the other whether it truly "understands" chinese?
I certainly could be! It has been a while. But are you saying your understand was that sentience was achieved in the scrambler's evolution, and then later discarded in favour of "more teraflops", if you'll excuse my analogy? That wasn't my understanding - but I might well be wrong.
Even if so, the idea remains unconvincing, in fact more so. After a species achieves a certain domination in its environment - something you would very much expect from a civilisation capable of building spacecraft - evolution simply doesn't apply any more, not in any darwinian sense. Even with humans, evolution has basically stopped, or if it continues, does so under circumstances entirely under our control. I find it impossible to imagine any naturally-ocurring scenario in which such any sentient species is forced by evolutionary pressure to optimise away consciousness in favour of other mental tasks. They would instead, as you mention, simply augment their powers with technology - or deliberate genetic intervention.
It's still an interesting premise and definitely got me thinking. I also highly recommend the book. It's actually quite exciting, all this philosophy does not take up that much space in the text ;)
The problem with the chinese room is that someone had to build it... and someone had to invent chinese.
If a person is born tomorrow, on earth, with a mutation that makes them slightly less sentient but more intelligent, they would not have any issue reproducing.
Or you could conduct this thought experiment: if chat-gpt4 were somehow installed in a robot with prompt "reproduce", do you think they would not replace humans after some time?
"Maybe it did." He paused long enough to chew food or suck smoke. "Chimpanzees are smarter than Orangutans, did you know that? Higher encephalisation quotient. Yet they can't always recognize themselves in a mirror. Orangs can."
"So what's your point? Smarter animal, less self-awareness? Chimpanzees are becoming nonsentient?"
"Or they were, before we stopped everything in its tracks."
"So why didn't that happen to us?"
"What makes you think it didn't?"
It was such an obviously stupid question that Sascha didn't have an answer for it. I could imagine her gaping in the silence.
"You're not thinking this through," Cunningham said. "We're not talking about some kind of zombie lurching around with its arms stretched out, spouting mathematical theorems. A smart automaton would blend in. It would observe those around it, mimic their behavior, act just like everyone else. All the while completely unaware of what it was doing. Unaware even of its own existence."
"Why would it bother? What would motivate it?"
"As long as you pull your hand away from an open flame, who cares whether you do it because it hurts or because some feedback algorithm says withdraw if heat flux exceeds critical T? Natural selection doesn't care about motives. If impersonating something increases fitness, then nature will select good impersonators over bad ones. Keep it up long enough and no conscious being would be able to pick your zombie out of a crowd." Another silence; I could hear him chewing through it. "It'll even be able to participate in a conversation like this one. It could write letters home, impersonate real human feelings, without having the slightest awareness of its own existence."
"I dunno, Rob. It just seems—"
"Oh, it might not be perfect. It might be a bit redundant, or resort to the occasional expository infodump. But even real people do that, don't they?"
"And eventually, there aren't any real people left. Just robots pretending to give a shit."
"Perhaps. Depends on the population dynamics, among other things. But I'd guess that at least one thing an automaton lacks is empathy; if you can't feel, you can't really relate to something that does, even if you act as though you do. Which makes it interesting to note how many sociopaths show up in the world's upper echelons, hmm? How ruthlessness and bottom-line self-interest are so lauded up in the stratosphere, while anyone showing those traits at ground level gets carted off into detention with the Realists. Almost as if society itself is being reshaped from the inside out."
"Oh, come on. Society was always pretty— wait, you're saying the world's corporate elite are nonsentient?"
"God, no. Not nearly. Maybe they're just starting down that road. Like chimpanzees."
"Yeah, but sociopaths don't blend in well."
"Maybe the ones that get diagnosed don't, but by definition they're the bottom of the class. The others are too smart to get caught, and real automatons would do even better. Besides, when you get powerful enough, you don't need to act like other people. Other people start acting like you."
While im not totally convinced about the premise of "1%ers" being zombies I think its again a bit more than an interesting thought experiment.
If machines can be sentient, then fire could be justifiably called sentient as well. Considering that our metabolic processes largely amount to exothermic energy transfer through oxidization and distribution via what amounts to liquid rust, I suppose the circle from man to machine to simpler machine to thermodynamics, and back to man, could be completed through this pathway.
The whole conversation here is about intelligence without sentience.
"If machines can be sentient, then fire could be justifiably called sentient as well."
I dont really know what you mean by that could you expand on that?
3 Body Problem did the same thing. It repeatedly presented the strengths of the Dark Forest Fermi paradox solution, but I don't think it ever presented the weaknesses, not even to lampshade. I usually try appreciate what's in a story rather than whine about what it "should have done" (which is a recipe for never enjoying anything) but in this case I've seen it negatively affect people who didn't already have the "antidote" background knowledge. I've seen this in online communities (you'd think there would always be at least one smartass in each sci-fi thread but I guess not) and I've seen it in person with a coworker, so I wonder if it isn't a bit of an ethics issue.
Ah well, on the scale of ethics issues this one is pretty minor. Most people are stable enough to handle spooky alien stories, and maybe the double take is part of the fun.
1: Remember that 3BP had to break the speed of light (among other things) to make the story work. A first strike is a huge gamble, you have to make sure your shot in the dark kills the monster rather than makes it angry. If you put information lag back into the equation (not to mention other intelligence gathering and military imperfections), the confidence that you need to make the game theory work starts to look incredibly steep.
2: Nearby grabby aliens are highly unlikely in any event because otherwise they would have grabbed already. The time to colonize the galaxy (millions of years) is tiny compared to likely variation in the timescale on which interstellar-capable life emerged and evolved (billions of years). If you turn the colonization of the galaxy into a 2 hour movie and separate it into periods of "no aliens," "sparse aliens," and "dense aliens," the "sparse aliens" section is one small scene lasting seconds. It would take an enormous feat of synchronization for us to be "born" into those few seconds rather than before or after (and "after" probably doesn't work because colonization stops development). "Sparse aliens" makes for great sci-fi, so we are predisposed to imagine that it is more likely than it actually is. It's like Jurassic Park: the dinosaurs don't always escape because the mathematics of chaos theory dictate that it would be impossible to put resurrected dinosaurs in a zoo, they escape because otherwise I wouldn't buy a movie ticket (and neither would you).
3: Suppose that the situation has defied the odds and there are spooky aliens out there just waiting to kill us. What's our move? Hide? Or grow aggressively? The "hide" option is already a bust, so we should grow aggressively. Everyone else will do the same. Just as the desirability of a first-strike hinges on unlikely confidence in the ability to effectively carry out complete retaliation-eliminating destruction on a rapidly advancing adversary far in the future, the desirability of hiding hinges on unlikely confidence in the ability to hide from adversaries with truly staggering surveillance options. Even if the forest is full of monsters, we do not expect them to hide.
I love the 3BP trilogy and the atmosphere of horror that it builds, I just don't think its thesis works very well IRL. Which is a good thing :)
A paranoid adaptation to a hostile world shirks conscious perception of complexity for a "all things are enemy out to get me" minimalistic consciousness as it would be found in a hunted mouse. The more dangerous the environment becomes the more reduced cognition seems to be. Assuming now that most civilizations destroy the environment they are in, longterm evolution should award subconscious processing.. That is focused on longterm instinct behavior.
Such a adaptation would present itself as worship of one's own gut feelings as divine being whos instructions and recommendations point towards less conscious processing and more optimization towards the environment, which does not reward consciousness and it's products:music, art, literature but rewards more offspring by continued existence.
Watts seemed pretty correct to me and the billions in subsistence or warzones arguing in religious mobs for less conscious processing seem to agree.
You are correct on the brain needed for conscious controlled cognition being expensive, thus only being able to be kept around by a scientific calorie surplus producing society.
Without that the universal Fermi trap closes shut, the individual forever adapting towards a barely conscious tool using tribal entity.
Reading the author notes about the ideas and what research they are based off is an extra pleasure after finishing one of his books.
I'm citing from here which also contain links to the actual Peter Watts reasoning: http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004689.html
I know I was thrown for a loop, since the book is (currently) very much in print, and you can find it in paperback on Amazon and BN.
The 2006 date is significant since it predates the Amazon Kindle (2007), which is where I bought my copy.
Aside: I have to agree with those same reviewers that Watts bemoans. Blindsight is fucking dense (but rewarding). I can't say I enjoyed it, but I'm glad I read it, and there are very few people in my friend circle I can imagine recommending it to.
one thing i am pretty sure though is that it didn't hurt.
Bonus points if it's self-hosted.
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