Blindsight (Watts Novel)
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I have an excerpt of the book explaining this here: https://jodavaho.io/posts/books-blindsight.html
The discussion about non-conscious intelligence was less so (I see ants every day!). But this is a new idea dense book to say the least - if you love worldbuilding, please pick it up.
Learning how modern AI's respond immediately made me think about how Rorschach was communicating with the crew and how current LLM AI's might be considered intelligent while not conscious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)#Consc...
While people might remember it for other more striking ideas, I was impressed with how it expounds the theory behind the claims that "intelligence implies violence". That entire narrative was quite chilling.
That, and the way the author explains how to establish a means of communication using just... pain.
It's a brilliant book.
IIRC, it was more "intelligence may be a maladaptive dead-end".
> might have some lingering trauma
Why does every character have to have some trauma? Just because the Oscar committee says so?
All of the characters are weird, super humans with their own problems. At one point, the vampire freaks out and attacks the protagonist. Which leads to some plot ramifications. If you are to maintain that structure, you require a teammate to lose their cool at a pivotal moment when it has been established that the team leader was better and more logical than everyone else.
The in-universe vampire explanation gives a rationale for the scenario. This does not hold if you trivially swap out for a different character, so some kind of hard-wired trigger is required.
The idea that human kind would in its moments of fear and panic reach back and put an anti-social predator in charge is also thematic. In traditional conceptions of hierarchy of "thinking", we would perhaps imagine the self/meta conscious self as being "the top layer", with the layer represented by vampires perhaps being a lower layer (we would imagine it being above "the reptile brain" though). Yet here, humanity (or human command) has chosen to invert the order. The self-awareness layer is capable and does "let go", because while it loves to take the credit for what the mind actually does, it does in fact understand self preservation (generally), and does understand that sometimes, it just needs to... not really be in control.
Final spoilers - and then there's the extra twist which is that the vampire captain was apparently being puppeted by a computer AI system (also implied to be not self aware) the whole time anyways.
So really, we have a pair of non-self aware intelligent systems probing each other. One deploying scramblers, the other deploying the human crew as end effectors.
Can still spin a tale with whatever adjusted sense of self you want without invoking mythical creatures that existed, died off, resurrected, and genetically spliced into humans for space travel.
A long time since I read the book, but I thought the human AIs claimed they could describe a consciousness-optional intelligence, but had not made one. Ergo the meat-puppet controller would have been a conscious AI.
Happy to be corrected on this point because it could partially address what seemed like an oddity to me. There exist super intelligent AIs, but on this incredibly important mission which could define continuing human existence - none of them are in control because AIs make humans uncomfortable. Instead, the AIs secretly operate a meat-puppet predator whose existence makes humans uncomfortable.
If you want a really shoehorned scifi vampire, there's a David Weber book in which it comes out of fucking nowhere towards the end.
This helped explained their downfall with man creating euclidean geometry everywhere and was taken advantage of when they where brought back as they where very good at certain tasks while also requiring anti seizure drugs which kept them in control.
Anyone who gets that far into the book doesn't need to have their hand held that much. I get that it's the entire point of the book, but everything until this point has been a challenging read.
Personally, I think it might have been interesting to rewrite the whole thing such that conclusion is ambiguous.
Also a big shout out to his less well-known novel, The Freeze Frame Revolution. It's about the crew of a "stargate"-seeding spaceship trying to stop the ship's AI, but being hampered by the fact that the AI is both near-omniscient and that they only work in short shifts before being put back in hibernation. He also wrote a handful of short stories set before and after the novel.
There's something very refreshingly direct, unvarnished, no-nonsense, and clear-eyed (some would say cynical) about Watts' style of writing. His prose tends to be tough (quite like early Gibson's noir style, with the punk attitude intact), but also beautifully cinematic. The only other write that I think comes close, aside from Gibson, is Dan Simmons with his Hyperion Cantos, but he's not nearly as darkly cynical.
Edit: another thing I didn't like was how the author just dumped pages and pages of his character-notes as background information for that character. At least that's how it felt on the multi-page flashback digressions. I skipped pages and pages of the book because it was irrelevant to the story.
Also, while I enjoyed the philosophy, as someone who has also read all of Oliver Sacks's books and took several philosophy of mind courses in college, it really felt like he just wanted to put in every cool Oliver Sacks-ian case study he had ever read.
But they were also added in without much context. In my book club (of intelligent people) I had to re-explain nearly all of them, e.g. the blindsight scene (from which the title comes from) is practically the entire thesis, but if you haven't heard of it before you can miss it.
Consequently, I'm not really sure who the book is for. I don't know any Christians who like atheistic hard scifi (although, I exist so there must be others). And I don't know many people into hard scifi who really care for the religious imagery.
Personally, I find the experience to be unique, so I think it's worth it if you can get into it.
Besides that (and to spoil the point of the book) the biggest flaw is that the author doesnt seem to trust the reader to get the point, which is that consciousness is an unnecessary (and detrimental) evolutionary dead end. Real intelligence is totally orthogonal.
As a software engineer who has seen very intelligent systems with no more consciousness than a paperclip for decades, I got on board with the premise as soon as it showed up. But then I kind of had to wade through case study after case study highlighting the idea.
[1] - this isnt atheism that's aggressive, but rather a universe where there's no doubt that there is no god with all of the consequences thereof.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(Simmons_novel) is a massive classic and is full of that stuff. The Matrix has The One die and be resurrected as a godlike glowing being.
Most atheists/Christians aren't as rigid as you imagine.
> a universe where there's no doubt that there is no god
The vast majority of scifi (and other genres) doesn't care or take a position either way. Nothing in Blindsight says "there can't be a God"; it has nothing to do with that.
Religion aside, the imagery is undeniably cool. It goes hard.
No other reason is required.
Do you mean that the universe itself provides clear, incontrovertible evidence there is no god? Or do you simply mean that in the universe portrayed, none of the people happen to have any doubt about the non-existence of god?
http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
My capsule summary:
In the 2070s, on the cusp of the singularity, a swarm of alien drones takes a snapshot of the Earth before burning up in the atmosphere. A small crew of bleeding-edge posthumans, all with different physical or mental augmentations, is sent to the outer Solar System to investigate the source. The narrator, Siri Keeton, is an emotionally lobotomized "synthesist" tasked with monitoring the mission and interpreting it for the leadership back home.
I don't want to spoil its frightening twists, but suffice to say that it shapes up to be a cosmic horror novel where the horror is rooted in abstract ideas like human cognition and the nature of consciousness. The book is peppered with philosophical concepts like the Chinese Room and (real-life) neurological quirks like blindsight, all bent towards smart, existential horror. Like Lovecraft mixed with Oliver Sacks.
And while the ideas are solid -- the author is a marine biologist who fills the appendix with citations of evolutionary and cognitive research -- what I really love is the prose. Watts is a fantastic hard SF writer, filling every page with authentic, charismatic narration, cinematic imagery, and a way of talking about abstruse scientific concepts in a way that punches you in the gut and chills you to the bone. His style is like a horror version of Douglas Adams, mind-bending ideas and memorable characters with a compulsively readable flow to it.
Its biggest weakness is that one of the most compelling aspects sounds like a pulpy joke at first glance -- the ship is led by a "vampire." I can't imagine how many people read this on the jacket and took a hard pass on Dracula in Space. But it's not some fantasy gimmick -- it's the in-universe nickname for an ancient, predatory, sociopathically brilliant subspecies of humanity that's been resurrected, Jurassic Park-style, to help manage high-stakes ventures like the first-contact mission. The captain starts off intriguing, quickly grows frightening, and eventually advances one of the book's most disturbing and unforgettable arguments.
Overall, it's not just my favorite SF novel, but one of my favorite novels, period. The only book I've ever bought a dead-tree copy to be signed by the author. Highly, highly recommended.
Despite that, still one of my all time favorite sci fi books. A fantastic exploration of intelligence, conscioussness and first contact.
Probably a bit too heavy on ideas for most and those who are only used to lighter cost might find it boring. But for me one my all time favorite sci-fi books.
Are you also opposed to open source software?
Donna Tartt takes about ten years to write a novel. Some writers take a month or two. It is not an easy task, and very few people can pull it off, let alone in a short time. The internet is full of free music, art and writing, with the result that creative people struggle to support themselves, because they are being undercut, and professional work is being converted into a hobby. The tax authorities, electricity companies, and supermarkets are not interested in whether you are self-centred or not as you put it. They want to be paid. (If you are on unemployment benefit while writing the book, they will demand that you look for other work during that time... Or claim you are able to work.)
They are free to do with their labour as they please. That includes charging for it. It also includes doing it pro-bono if they feel like it.
The self-centered part is the idea that they would never want to do it pro-bono. Electricians, plumbers do sometimes do work pro-bono if they feel it is a worthy cause. That is what freedom is: the ability to choose for yourself.
> The internet is full of free music, art and writing, with the result that creative people struggle to support themselves, because they are being undercut
were you under the impression that creatives were well paid before the internet?
It is self-centred to expect everyone to work for you for free. That is why we now have AI destroying creative industries, because it has become normalised not to pay people for using their content.
In parts of Africa the local textile and clothing industries have been destroyed by large amounts of free clothing being offloaded onto them by the developed world. This has been done with good intent, but it means that Africans have been put out of work, and so that they cannot sell their clothes on the international market. If those areas could develop a clothing industry it would bring much needed money into their economy and make them less dependent on onerous bank loans.
"were you under the impression that creatives were well paid before the internet?"
Yes, they were being better paid. Musicians had unions for one. Spotify and YouTube do not pay fair rates for their music, yet rake in from advertising. Old radio stations paid better.
This has been a problem in bars and venues. They tell lies like 'it will look good on your CV/resumé" or "it will get you attention". But if many of them are willing do it unpaid, it means a lot of the pubs won't pay anyone to play.
But literally nobody is suggesting anyone, let alone everyone should be expected to work for free or do anything they don't want to.
> I've been running a writing group for four years now. I'm not paid to do that, and I set it up myself, but it is not putting someone else out of a job
You are competing with people who run paid writing workshops. It puts people out of a job to the same extent as the author posting his book on his website did. I personally think that neither does, but i'm not sure how you can come to the conclusion that one does but not another without being a hypocrite. Hell, you even used teacher as one of your examples in an earlier post.
That undermines other novelists who are in most cases making barely any money to begin with. I know people who specifically go for free books in preference to ones they have to pay for.
I submitted an article to a magazine some years ago, which I had spent WEEKS researching. They turned it down and it mysteriously popped up on a blog, uncredited, and only lightly rewritten. I had to threaten legal action. But it was sickening given how much work I had put into it. I am not wealthy, in fact I struggle to pay my life expenses. This year was the first time I was able to take a holiday away from home in several years.
"Are you also opposed to open source software?"
I think people should be paid for work. We have it arse backwards in this society. Parasitic megacorporations get paid exorbitant amounts of money for crappy products through their cartels, and barely pay any tax... Whereas other people are expected to work for nothing. Being able to work for free means that you have the time and money to do so. But unfortunately it means that people expect other people's labour to be for free even though that is not how the economy works.
Companies like Wikimedia, Duolingo, IMDB, social media and so on, are taking unpaid labour and making money off it. Wikimedia Wikimedia got $150M in donations during July 1, 2020—June 30, 2021. 67M wen on salaries, with 9M of it going to management, and apparently pocketed 50M. Needless to say, the bulk of Wikimedia's labour never sees a bolt in compensation.
Most people like things that are free. Obviously. I myself make good use of my library card.
> I submitted an article to a magazine some years ago, which I had spent WEEKS researching. They turned it down and it mysteriously popped up on a blog, uncredited, and only lightly rewritten.
That sucks. But is besides the point. The key is consent. You didn't consent to that. The author of this book chose to make it freely available. Just like you are making your comments on hn freely available. its all about choice.
> Wikimedia got $150M in donations during July 1, 2020—June 30, 2021. 67M wen on salaries, with 9M of it going to management, and apparently pocketed 50M. Needless to say, the bulk of Wikimedia's labour never sees a bolt in compensation.
As an active participant in Wikimedia movement, i'm very familiar with it.
Nobody "pocketed it". They keep a reserve for unexpected expenses or if fundraising goes poorly. There are plenty of things you can fault the Wikimedia Foundation for, but this seems like a stupid one. Obviously they are going to keep some money in the bank, just in case something unexpected happens.
Quoting from:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2enwks/iama_science_f...
So I saw two options. 1: Book tanks, nobody can read it; or 2) book tanks, anyone can read it. I saw no option where Blindsight would ever make money. So what the hell, thought I-- I may die poor, but maybe I won't die completely obscure. Told my editor I was going to set everything free under a Creative Commons license-- it would have broken the contract, but Cory Doctorow had been getting away with it for years and besides, I figured my writing career was pretty much kaput anyway. Editor asked me to wait a month, to see if things turned around. I waited. They didn't. Finis.
The week after I started giving Blindsight away, sales tripled. The rest is history.
I know writers who tried giving their book away for free, and got almost no sales or good reviews afterwards. They aren't all selling terrible books either.
Would you seriously ask a taxi driver to give you free rides before they got paid? Or would you ask a teacher to work for six months unpaid in order to get a couple of years work later on?
I know this mentality is encouraged in some places with interns, but it is a luxury of people who can already support themselves.
If I were a talented writer and had the ability to produce content as engaging as Peter Watts', I'd put it online for free.
Whatever 'harm' I might do to other authors or taxi drivers or plumbers with this practice is far outweighed by the good that is done to the world by its release.