Author Topic: Blindsight  (Read 444 times)

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Silenus

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Blindsight
« on: December 07, 2021, 07:40:43 pm »

Blindsight by Peter Watts

"Watching the world from a distance, it occurred to me at last: I knew exactly what Chelsea had meant, with her Luddite ramblings about desaturated Humanity and the colorless interactions of virtual space. I'd known all along.

I'd just never been able to see how it was any different from real life.."


Quote from:  "Blindsight by Peter Watts: A Review" published by www.AEscifi.ca, 11/08/2010
Blindsight is a book about a ship. The Theseus is the most powerful spacecraft ever built by mankind. The pinnacle of engineering, manufactured in a mad scramble and sent blasting off to the Kuiper Belt at a hellfire burn before the paint is even dry on the blast doors. Because something is out there.

Tens of thousands of alien satellites have appeared in orbit above the Earth. They’ve taken our picture and sent the film to a processing lab out at the edge of the solar system where mankind has never visited. And so: Theseus and her crew. On a mission to make contact with visitors we know nothing about.

And what a crew it is. Four dysfunctional transhumans and their captain. There is Isaac Szpindel, the scientist: his neural pathways so rewired for interfacing with machines and computers he can no longer interface with the real world without help. There is Amanda Bates, the military contingent: her body a deadly amalgam of flesh and steel and her job to be the one willing to shoot the new kid on the block in the face, if that’s what needs doing. There is Susan James — or rather, there are Susan James, the ambassador: her brain partitioned surgically to make room for five distinct personalities, each with their own linguistic or anthropological specialty. There is Siri Keeton, the synthesist: survivor of a radical hemispherectomy, the remainder of his skull filled with gadgets for recording and communicating and god knows what else. And there is Jukka Sarasti, the captain: the smartest, deadliest, most capable mind that millennia of evolution could produce. Oh yeah, and he’s a vampire.

The result is a ship so full of tension and distrust that, by the time Theseus rendezvouses with the alien craft, it seems doomed even if greeted by the most benevolent of possible extraterrestrials. Which, of course, they aren’t. Initial contact with Rorschach, as the massive alien craft styles itself, is civil and painless; the aliens seem to have a faultless command of idiomatic English and no greater demands than to be left alone. But Sarasti is suspicious, and he’s not the only one. The technical capabilities of Rorschach are far beyond even Theseus and it is clear that deep within, the aliens are building something grand and frightening. It bears a closer look. And that’s when things go south.

[...]

As readers, we ride along on this suicide mission in the head of Siri Keeton, sharing steerage with half a brain’s worth of hardware. Siri is the best translator in the world. But he doesn’t translate languages, he translates paradigms. He is on the Theseus to help the hyperspecialised crew communicate with one another. More importantly, he is also the line of communication back to Earth. But, though he is a master of helping people understand each other, he always fails at understanding anyone himself.

Siri is a mess of the same neuroses, insecurities and autism-spectrum traits (ostensibly due to the surgery, but there is certainly room for doubt) that define both the stereotypical geek and, strangely enough, Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man and his countless reflections and variations in contemporary fiction, from Yossarian to Seinfeld. The book reads like a mainstream introspective narrative. Blindsight is, to be quite honest, a philosophical investigation on the nature of consciousness and the fallacy of real human connection set against a backdrop of vampires and aliens. And it works.


Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?  You send a linguist with multiple personalities carved surgically into her brain. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultra- sound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior whose career-defining moment was an act of treason. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist — an informational topologist with half his mind gone — as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.

You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world.
You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.

But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...

Quote from:  Excerpted from References in lieu of interest to readers

'Intelligence'

This is the heart of the whole damn exercise. Let's get the biggies out of the way first. Metzinger's Being No One is the toughest book I've ever read (and there are still significant chunks of it I haven't), but it also contains some of the most mindblowing ideas I've encountered in fact or fiction. Most authors are shameless bait-and-switchers when it comes to the nature of consciousness. Pinker calls his book How the Mind Works, then admits on page one that "We don't understand how the mind works". Koch (the guy who coined the term "zombie agents") writes The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, in which he sheepishly sidesteps the whole issue of why neural activity should result in any kind of subjective awareness whatsoever.

Towering above such pussies, Metzinger takes the bull by the balls. His "World-zero" hypothesis not only explains the subjective sense of self, but also why such an illusory first-person narrator would be an emergent property of certain cognitive systems in the first place. I have no idea whether he's right— the man's way beyond me— but at least he addressed the real question that keeps us staring at the ceiling at three a.m., long after the last roach is spent. Many of the syndromes and maladies dropped into Blindsight I first encountered in Metzinger's book. Any uncited claims or statements in this subsection probably hail from that source.

If they don't, then maybe they hail from Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will instead. Less ambitious, far more accessible, Wegner's book doesn't so much deal with the nature of consciousness as it does with the nature of free will, which Wegner thumbnails as "our mind's way of estimating what it thinks it did.". Wegner presents his own list of syndromes and maladies, all of which reinforce the mind-boggling sense of what fragile and subvertible machines we are. And of course, Oliver Saks was sending us memos from the edge of consciousness long before consciousness even had a bandwagon to jump on.

[...]

Cunningham's stats about self-recognition in primates: those too are real. Chimpanzees have a higher brain-to-body ratio than orangutans, yet orangs consistently recognise themselves in mirrors while chimps do so only half the time. Similarly, those nonhuman species with the most sophisticated language skills are a variety of birds and monkeys—not the presumably "more sentient" great apes who are our closest relatives. If you squint, facts like these suggest that sentience might almost be a phase, something that orangutans haven't yet grown out of but which their more-advanced chimpanzee cousins are beginning to. (Gorillas don't self-recognise in mirrors. Perhaps they've already grown out of sentience, or perhaps they never grew into it.)

Of course, Humans don't fit this pattern. If it even is a pattern. We're outliers: that's one of the points I'm making.

Full text in multiple formats, Author's website.


This is much more than a sci-fi novel.  Hentrich, Raul, Holden, Ibra - I hope you all have been well.
« Last Edit: December 07, 2021, 08:21:59 pm by Silenus »

"And the strict master Death bids them dance."

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raul

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Re: Blindsight
« Reply #1 on: December 09, 2021, 04:57:59 am »
Silenus,

Thank you for your comments. I hope you are doing allright wherever you are.

Stay safe.

Holden

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Re: Blindsight
« Reply #2 on: December 12, 2021, 06:25:21 am »

"his neural pathways so rewired for interfacing with machines and computers he can no longer interface with the real world"

I want a brain like that.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

Nation of One

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Re: Blindsight
« Reply #3 on: December 12, 2021, 07:43:56 am »
It appears to be an exciting read.  Thanks for the heads up, Silenus.  I grabbed the PDF and sent it to a Kindle. 

Cream of Wheat has been my modern day miracle.  Eating it always puts me in that sci-fi zone ...

I am finding existence extra creepy as of late, and the poor Beast that I am meets with nothing but complaints and hostility if it dare display its ill-temper.  I know Hesse was reaching for philosophical autobiography with Steppenwolf, but I think we could use some fiction with Metzinger's theories mixed in the narrative. 

It is sometimes frightening to witness the chaos of actual life undfolding, where we can be so far removed from past "intellectual projects," so overwhelmed with dealing with our own wounded and angry animal carcus. 

Laying in the horizontal position, allowing the Beast Thing to groan, oftentimes consciousness finds peace.  These little tricks are gold; but interpersonal relations are a disaster, something out of Kafka's nightmares.  Even when I articulate my own deep understanding of my inner-hostility and "meanness" (to my aging mother), I get hit with guilt trips for the very meanness I am explaining.  I like to eat my Cream of Wheat without her bombarding me over money-issues.  My own private-inner Kafkian nightmare requires I stay abreast of the state of my own brain constantly.  The Creature and Consciousness have to stay on the side of That Which Suffers Existence.

It is a relief to consider the possibility that our identities are fictions created by the organism-as-a-whole-in-environments, but I get a creepy feeling that those who control the masses would figure out ways of creating certain behaviors in classes of denizens in order to carry out their sinister plans.
« Last Edit: December 12, 2021, 11:20:29 am by The Creature »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Holden

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Re: Blindsight
« Reply #4 on: December 12, 2021, 09:52:14 am »
The brain constantly creates the experience that I am present in a world outside my brain. - Metzinger
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

Nation of One

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Re: Blindsight
« Reply #5 on: December 13, 2021, 12:05:18 am »
In the Prologue, the author of Blindsight mentions Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will.

Wegner's book doesn't so much deal with the nature of consciousness as it does with the nature of free will, which Wegner thumbnails as "our mind's way of estimating what it thinks it did.". Wegner presents his own list of syndromes and maladies, all of which reinforce the mind-boggling sense of what fragile and subvertible machines we are.

In science fiction, the word "sentience" is sometimes used interchangeably with "sapience", "self-awareness", or "consciousness" : [Sentience]

Eastern religions including Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism recognise non-humans as sentient beings.  The term sentient beings is translated from various Sanskrit terms (jantu, bahu jana, jagat, sattva) and "conventionally refers to the mass of living things subject to illusion, suffering, and rebirth (Saṃsāra)" ...

I see that Wegner has already been methodically attacked:  Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Scientific Epiphenomenalism.
« Last Edit: December 13, 2021, 12:59:04 am by sentient nothing »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~