[General Battuta]

I do not believe I have read a book since Blood Meridian that more directly and brilliantly speaks the truth of what we really are. And it does so as a cracking good SF novel rather than an enormous and borderline unreadable McCormac tome.

You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it's for?

Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial.

Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other.
But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you.

Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it.

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step.

Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way.

And it's fighting back.

*

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains—cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes ever-more computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.

Read this ****. It'll help you figure out what the Shivans might actually be, and why we could be a dead end, a cancer, an intermediate step to be shucked by something not more but less.

Frightening truths in this work. And I don't mean woo-woo Ishmael philosophy or whatever, this is hard like my abs.

It's a novel published with great acclaim, but it's also free right here.

[General Battuta]

**** I'm super pissed at this book for absolutely nailing the thesis I wanted to use in my own hard SF.

EDIT: MP-Ryan you should read this book, I want to talk about the mother****ing aliens with you, they are some crazy ****.

[Mars]

Me likey! I'd have to say that I see people as a fair bit more complex than that, and although some seriously aggravating things are hard wired, out particular neural networks are pretty impressive things to have evolved.

[General Battuta]

I didn't post the punch line of the book, which is not the last line but comes near the end and is just one of the most devastating pieces of science fiction writing I have ever seen. I wish I could spoil it.

The aliens in this book are so well done. Described down to the last detail (so no resorting to 'we cannot know or comprehend!' tricks), but utterly unlike humans.

[Shivan Hunter]

Hmm. Definitely need to check this out, been meaning to get into some good SF.

[PsychoLandlord]

I liked that snippet you posted. A lot. AS someone who, unfortunately, has yet to pick up on any truly good Sci-Fi,  this has piqued my interest immensely. I'll give it  a read later.

[Mars]

Hoooleeeee****.

I just read the forward. This book is so far awesome.

[Ravenholme]

**** I'm super pissed at this book for absolutely nailing the thesis I wanted to use in my own hard SF.

EDIT: MP-Ryan you should read this book, I want to talk about the mother****ing aliens with you, they are some crazy ****.

I think I recommended this in the WHIYL thread a while back. It is a cracking good read. Or possibly it was in the Crysis 2 thread, as he co-wrote C2 with Richard Morgan

[Mikes]

I've read Blindsight a few months ago and loved it.

I would also recommend the authors other boooks.


One of the best authors i came across in years.

Not for the faint of heart and outright disturbing in some parts (especially the Starfish trilogy), but also really really good.


Anyways, if you liked Blindsight, then don't hesitate to try Starfish, Maelstrom and Behemoth.

[0rph3u5]

from what I read (both here and after searching for the book online) I could have used such a book last semester while I had to attend a lecture on "Critique of Pure Reason"...
but well it is never too late to read a good book

[watsisname]

Color me deeply intrigued!  This looks to be precisely the sort of literature that I've been hoping to stumble upon for a long while, so thanks a quintillion for posting, Bats.

[Snail]

This looks really interesting, I just fear it'll go straight over my head like most things do.

[JCDNWarrior]

It's a pretty great piece of text for a fiction work, fits so much as a monologue by an alien narrator explaining the reasons behind their actions. The underlying venom and anger towards humanity and what we are is noticeable between the lines, which in the form of story reveals there's more to them than a well-spoken but unfounded hatred/for the sake of conflict. Makes for a awesome nemesis, rather than a typical villain.

[pecenipicek]

Dear god. This... this is something...



Battuta, i hate you for breaking my brain so utterly by sharing this.

[General Battuta]

Dear god. This... this is something...



Battuta, i hate you for breaking my brain so utterly by sharing this.

Did you read it?

Man what a ****ing great book. I actually thought the narrative got a little sloppy at the climax (would've tightened it up were I him), but the 'punch line' and denouement were just on the money.

[Bobboau]

will someone post the TL;DR already.

[General Battuta]

nooo

[pecenipicek]

Dear god. This... this is something...



Battuta, i hate you for breaking my brain so utterly by sharing this.

Did you read it?

Man what a ****ing great book. I actually thought the narrative got a little sloppy at the climax (would've tightened it up were I him), but the 'punch line' and denouement were just on the money.

Yes, i read it. Thats what i'm swearing about.

Spoiler:

I loved the book up to the point after the capture of the 2 "starfishies". Afterwards it kinda fell lower and lower. And i loved stuff up to that point because it gave a ****ton of stuff to think about. However, after that, it all kinda went downhill and into what basicallly amounts to "sentience is bad, mmkay?" and the fact that our dear lone survivor of the whole incident is probably the last "wise man" left by the time he's about to reach our blue marble.

@Bobboau, Strange blinky stuff appears, crew gets sent, cosmic horror noms them all but one, everybody dies.


For anything else read the story. Its damn good.

[Retsof]

I remember that one.  It was freaky, but good.  Really made you think on the nature of sentience.

[General Battuta]

Spoiler:

I loved the book up to the point after the capture of the 2 "starfishies". Afterwards it kinda fell lower and lower. And i loved stuff up to that point because it gave a ****ton of stuff to think about. However, after that, it all kinda went downhill and into what basicallly amounts to "sentience is bad, mmkay?" and the fact that our dear lone survivor of the whole incident is probably the last "wise man" left by the time he's about to reach our blue marble.

uphill bro, uphill (and it was really chillingly well-thought-out, it wasn't a didactic or a prescription like you make it out to be, it was more like a fearful rumination)