If you're into scifi at all you should read this. I wont spoil it but its about intelligence and consciousness. the writing is good too which is rare in scifi
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#305702
Blindsight by Peter Watts
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Probably one of my favorite sci-fi books. Felt like an actual plausible vision of the future (vampires aside) and captured a lot of anxieties that are sharper today than when the book was written. I liked it better than Solaris, which was already a pretty great book.
On the other hand, I couldn't make it through the sequel at all.
Side note,I think most readers take the characters' statements about the aliens too literally. They're guessing and they never fully understand what the aliens even are. The individual created bodies may not be conscious, in the same way that an individual neuron is not conscious. But the system itself may be conscious, and it may have lots of aspects the characters never perceive. The characters expect aliens to be human-adjacent. When they don't conform to human expectations, the characters instead decide that the whole thing is a completely depersonified cosmic accident.
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Your spoilers fail to pass the test of the entire theme of the book.
The vampires are less conscious than humans. They are superior to humans.
The human mind group people stop being conscious at an individual level when they merge their minds together, they are superior to humans and almost on par with vampires.
The aliens are even more inhuman and superior to even the vampires.
The strong AI's built by humans that escaped humanity's control of them are even more superior to any other life on the planet and yet they are incomprehensible to how humans think or process reality.
Even the author himself is supposedly a depressed nihilist so it is unlikely that his novel worked on the idea of le humans just cannot relate to conscious beings who are not like them.
The whole idea of the story is that while humans react imperfectly to systems of information by having their feelings get in the way, All other life evolved on the maximize chances of survival every living moment possible.
Imagine from the moment you were born the only instinct working in your brain was the instinct to maximize your gains and perfection. Not a single other thought ever occurred in that head of your and you spent every single moment of existence in this state. That's the closest to what the rest of life in the universe is other than humans.
Like a paperclip maximizer program runing forever but instead of maximizing paperclips its maximizing its survival and reproduction.
Honestly, when you look back at it and how chat programs are called next word token generators, the alien life in blindsight is literally a ChatGPT species that's just generating the next best token to get the right results forever.
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The vampires aren't superior to humans, because they can be disabled by looking at right angles. The brain is funny, it determines our reality in ways much greater and weirder than we would usually think about. More than just better/worse, smarter/dumber. The book explores many different ways of being which are outside of the normal human experience. And the aliens are the most extreme example of that.
Yours is certainly a fair interpretation, and that may be the author's intent. But I think it's also fair to bring in outside context to this sort of story, and look for something a little messier. The flip side of "arrrghhh the universe is a cold and unfeeling machine!!!" is "oh yeah, ayylmaos? Well we have LOVE! Beat that!" and those are both fairly simplistic reactions, which I think the story gives us some space to complicate. Humanity could push past the emotional responses and discover more about this new form of life, because life is interesting.
I'm not saying the ayys must be conscious in the same way we are, but that the book does not actually provide enough information to learn anything meaningful about them, precisely because they are so far beyond humans in many respects. So humans (or other Earth life and AI) claiming to have them figured out seems hubristic. We're interpreting them by our own way of being. I'm okay with leaving it at "they are a form of life that we cannot comprehend, and us saying that they lack "consciousness" is no different than them saying we lack "F̷̛͈͕͎̲͕̹͕̋̓͆̎͛͂́̉̒̈̔̀̇̾͝͠d̵͕̥͉̥̠͓̲̞͔̱̩̓͊̊̒͒͊͆̉͒́̕͝g̴̢̧̖̜̘̖̟̱̮̻̦̟̹̓̈̅̈̂͑̈́̍̅̐͛̈́̍̕͜͝͝ͅg̵̳̠̗̳͒̅e̴̥̳̥͇͔̱̪͔̰͉͔̳͆͑̓̕h̶̬̠̫͇̝̐̈́̀͒̃̄͋̈̾̍̈́̓n̶̰̥̮̞͖͇̝͕̯̘̾͒̾̄̚v̶̟͌̈́́̋̍̾̑f̴̡͓͈͈̖͙͉͍̬͚̟̺̣̈́͝ͅr̴̥̣̂̅̅."
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I don't have enough spoons to read this shit
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They are superior to humans. The reason they lost is just genetic bad luck more so than anything else.
Death of the author.
AI actually could have because the AI in the blindsight universe managed to become so powerful as to be just doing its own thing separate from humanity.
Have you read the second book in the blindsight series? It ties the themes together and carries them on from one book to the next.
Sometimes a vampire is just a plague upon mankind instead of a misunderstood sparkling s*x symbol.
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I started the second book, but didn't get too far (filtered?). The lack of a clearly defined mission made it a lot harder to get into. I get that the protag was supposed to be confused too, but it just felt like random events. Should I give it another shot?
The use of AI was interesting to me in the first book. It was directing the humans' actions without them really seeing or thinking about it. The humans were unknowingly acting as parts of a broader intelligent system, just as the alien bodies were, but they were unable to perceive it for most of the story.
The use of intelligent AI implied to me that humans could evolve into a collective entity whose individual parts don't understand their technological over-mind, but still remain conscious. Meanwhile, the individual alien bodies appear to lack consciousness, but are part of a much larger system that is intelligent in ways that neither the human nor alien bodies can perceive. As I mentioned, I think this entire system could be conscious in some way, though it doesn't have to be.
I suppose what interested me most thematically was the interaction between individual bodies and intelligent systems, rather than the question of consciousness itself.
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I think you will enjoy the book more if you go in with the mentality that the story isn't about the mission, but it is about the questions being raised along the journey and the human perspective.
I think the protag being confused 24/7 actually adds to the theme of how far behind humanity had been left in the book. You are basically the equivalent of a mouse trying to understand why men pay taxes. Except for you them unaugmented human, every single other character you come across appears to be modified or upgraded in one way or the other.
The protagonist represents the current position of the average human in the world of exhopraxia. Where he is so far below all the other types of intelligence that have emerged so far that he can only be an onlooker in the story of his own species.
Thanks. I never fully appreciated that before.
I believe the story of echopraxia answers this question by showing the human overmind failing and even after it has failed the protagonist still cannot tell for certain whether the overmind actually failed or not because even until the end the overmind has left messages for the protagonist that it could not have unless it had planned the exact outcome since the beginning.
At best we cannot really say whether the human overmind is superior or inferior to the alien hivemind, but we can say that they are both far up enough above the average human that the human cannot tell.
I got into blindsight because everybody raved about its ideas regarding consciousness but to be honest I was too young to really get anything except that the main character was severely neurodivergent equivalent. Blindsight makes a whole lot more sense now that the AI age has taken some actual steps to perform near human parity.
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That was a mistake. You're about to find out the hard way why.
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