Author Topic: Peter Watts, 'Blindsight': finally, aliens without the bull****  (Read 15687 times)

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Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Peter Watts, 'Blindsight': finally, aliens without the bull****
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No it's not. Not at all.

You're right, so it's god, which is another way of saying it's an epiphany or some sort of thing.

It's irrelevant to my point, which is that such a diatribe is meaningless if taken seriously, it would have meant nothing for an egoless being, no egoless being could even have uttered it. So the conclusion is that it's the ego in an existential crysis. Middle age, perhaps? ;)

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No it doesn't. A realistic look at the advantages and disadvantages of self-awareness is the best strategy for a self-aware entity to cope. Being self-aware of self-awareness is one of the only tactics the self-aware have. Self-aware entities built Theseus, after all, which is the only agency in the story which can keep up with Rorschach.

The argument made about self-awareness is that it is sub-optimal. But a spectrum of strategies will still exist for the self-aware to cope. Pretending that self-awareness is not problematic is a more sub-optimal strategy than the alternative (embodied by science fiction novel Blindsight) of examining the weaknesses of self-awareness.

That's what you got out of the novel, but I'm not speaking about that. I'm speaking about the thesis of the novel by itself. Perhaps no single strategy is "better", but the argument is made that this self-awareness was only a mistake or something abhorrent in the universe and in earth itself (the argument about the orangutans and chimps), and that vampires were some sort of (half selfless) ubermen (nietzschian sense), or that selfless machines would eventually substitute mankind.

The thesis, as I read it, is that this self-awareness is just a small blip in the universe, and that real "intelligence", which is just as capable of warfare (and  pretty efficient at it) is all that matters in the great wheel of entropy.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Peter Watts, 'Blindsight': finally, aliens without the bull****
Man the scariest ****ing part of the whole book was when

Spoiler:
James gets trapped outside the shelter tent during their first boarding of Rorschach and hallucinates that she's dead. That was the freakiest ****.

  

Offline achtung

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Re: Peter Watts, 'Blindsight': finally, aliens without the bull****
Man the scariest ****ing part of the whole book was when

Spoiler:
James gets trapped outside the shelter tent during their first boarding of Rorschach and hallucinates that she's dead. That was the freakiest ****.

Spoiler:
Was it her or Bates that firmly believed they didn't exist? I think it was Bates.
Now that is something I found creepy.
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: Peter Watts, 'Blindsight': finally, aliens without the bull****
You are right, I am wrong. (See I told you I couldn't keep them straight.)

 

Offline Ravenholme

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Re: Peter Watts, 'Blindsight': finally, aliens without the bull****
Man the scariest ****ing part of the whole book was when

Spoiler:
James gets trapped outside the shelter tent during their first boarding of Rorschach and hallucinates that she's dead. That was the freakiest ****.

Spoiler:
Was it her or Bates that firmly believed they didn't exist? I think it was Bates.
Now that is something I found creepy.

Yeah, it was.

Spoiler:
Not just hallucinating that you're dead, but that you don't [and possibly never did] exist must be the largest mindscrew in the history of mankind. Completely Mental BSOD
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Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Peter Watts, 'Blindsight': finally, aliens without the bull****
Funny, I wasn't scared about that part. I know it's probably stupid on my part, but I was rather more scared at the
Spoiler:
Rorscharch's ability to mindlessly speak and to fool the group for hours, specially at the end of it, when it went for the jugular and chastised the group for thinking they were speaking to a chinese room, and the threat against Susan. A chinese room performing psychological warfare. It was so real while not being so, that it scared me a bit. It's like those nightmares I had when I was a child where the tv set somehow gained consciousness and went to get me, but reversed. The thing is so real while not being that it poses the question, are we real at all?

edited to put the spoiler tags. sorry
« Last Edit: April 05, 2011, 07:47:44 pm by Luis Dias »

 

Offline mxlm

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Re: Peter Watts, 'Blindsight': finally, aliens without the bull****
ItT, spoilers don't need tags.

Apparently.
I will ask that you explain yourself. Please do so with the clear understanding that I may decide I am angry enough to destroy all of you and raze this sickening mausoleum of fraud down to the naked rock it stands on.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Peter Watts, 'Blindsight': finally, aliens without the bull****
ItT, spoilers don't need tags.

Apparently.

Fortunately I think most of what he spoiled was early in the book, you should be okay. Just press on and ignore this thread.

 

Offline MP-Ryan

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Re: Peter Watts, 'Blindsight': finally, aliens without the bull****
NECROE'D FTW!

Actually, I just finished reading this and the accompanying notes and am fully primed for discussion.  A few comments on the narrative itself:

It got much better near the end.  Perhaps it's because I neither read nor particularly enjoy "hard" sci-fi as a matter of course, but I found this book genuinely exhausting to read; thematically (in light of the narrative voice) the use of jargonistic theoretical-speak made a lot of sense to the overall tone of the book and drove home a great point that Siri's character was clearly designed to showcase: conscious understanding isn't an essential component of concept acquisition.  While I get the point (and think it was well-crafted), it made this thing a pain in the ass to read.  That was further compounded by how terrible plain-text reading is on a BlackBerry Torch - my own fault.

Watts admitted that the book had become too laced with theory and that he had to cut a great deal; I disagree.  The theoretical aspects weren't especially jarring; instead, the use of assuming technical detail without the associated background made descriptive elements in the text very difficult to follow; theory was not the problem; ambiguity in description was.  Of course, that ambiguity probably serves an essential element in the overall theme of the narrative and Siri's specific subtext.

Enough about the technical aspects of the writing.  The plot and theme were sufficient to keep my interest and continue reading.  What I really want to talk about here is the theme (sentience is not an essential aspect of intelligence and may be an impairment or confound on true intellect) and the vehicle through which it is conveyed:  the vampires, and the aliens.

I have a beef:  even with the big AI reveal at the end, the characteristics attributed to Sarasti throughout the narrative do not jive with the premise that the vampires are either manifestations or on their way to becoming a non-conscious intellectual species.  Watts somewhat crapped that point, BUT that seems to have derived from his own ambiguous feelings on whether consciousness it evolutionarily-derived and fitness-based.  I'll forgive him.  However, for a being/interface whose motivations were supposedly non-sentient according to the end of the narrative, Sarasti has a lot of elements that speak to sentience and contextualized decision-making.  Watts didn't go far enough in the vampire character for my liking, and the interface described at the end somewhat cheapens the overall revelation; the narrative makes a great deal out of vampires' apparently unlimited perceptive abilities (no "ignore" filter, like mere humans) and then it fizzles... and then we're just supposed to accept the leap that comes near the end (insurrection).  Not so impressed on that score; Sarasti was the most interesting character by far, and then it just fizzled.

Now, let's talk about the aliens.  From the description, I must admit I first thought of echinoderms (sea stars, specifically) so I was fairly amused to discover in the notes that Watts is a marine biologist who likened them to brittle stars.  It gave me a chuckle.  It's also interesting that the characters make an earlier reference to octopi, since the scramblers share a lot of their characteristics (aside from a true nervous center).  The distributed neural processing was a unique device that certainly bears thinking about, and I think Watts recognized that such things do exist [to a limited extent] in nature here on Earth; moreover, that is probably his point.  Should we think of an ant colony or biofilm as discrete organisms working synergistically, or would it be more appropriate to think of them as a single distributed organism (the latter conception holds great appeal to me).  One of the most thought-provoking pieces is actually in the notes; the observation of competition in a human's various systems is perfectly accurate, and I admit that the immune system has held particular fascination for me since taking my first immunology class several years ago.

I must admit, my first guess on the character of the scramblers was a distributed intelligence operating  through individual discrete organisms, and while Watts doesn't rule that out some passages allude more tightly to individual processing and then sharing with a collective.  Regardless, they are biologically and psychology interesting because they are so alien to what we normally think of as life (although I don't think they're particularly alien in terms of what life on Earth actually represents; see my earlier comment on ants / biofilms).  The distributed intelligence, where I thought Watts was going, would be more alien than what he actually described.

However... much as I find the narrative theme and the questions arising from it fascinating, I disagree with the premise (Watts himself says he hopes he isn't correct about it regardless).  I can buy everything about the scramblers (trying to formulate an argument against a non-sentient intelligence taking measures against a perceived threat is extremely difficult), but I have difficulty in buying into a premise that sentience is a cumbersome non-essential byproduct of the evolution of complex reasoning, because the "I" is an important component of emotion and motivation, and social behaviour in general.  No species is truly altruistic; there is always a fitness pay-off in some way.  "I" allows for the formulation of empathy, which permits complex social bonding.  This is my problem with a lot of the discussion around consciousness and sentience in the first place - I think we've got the defining parameters wrong.  If humans are sentient, then so are many other species; conversely, if other species are not then neither are we.  It's a spectrum, a gradient, not a defining set of rules that constitute a binary state like so many psychologists try to characterize it.  Consciousness does indeed limit problem-solving potential, but it also serves to enhance it in other ways.  Consciousness is non-linear; and here I refer to daydreams.  Letting your mind wander is probably the most conscious act you can take, and yet we tend to characterize consciousness as the typical think-then-react linear path.  THAT is reflex.  We characterize it in an "I" state because that's how we understand the world in general, but that doesn't make it a conscious act.  As Watts pointed out here, in many cases the act actually precedes the thought that commanded it, and we edit the context to think we're exercising will.  We're not - those actions are really no different than those of your family dog or cat, we just conceptualize and rationalize the actions of our biological selves to fit within our conception of ourselves as whole beings.  Rather, I tend to think that our true consciousness operates both outside and independently of our biological state; sure, the wiring is all chemical and we have some direct control in terms of rationalizing what we do, but our actual thinking ability exists outside of our physical state.

All life is sentient and conscious, to degrees; the trouble is that I don't think those terms have been adequately defined.  If humanity is indeed sentient, then I think it would be very hard to truly argue that the vampires or the scramblers are not.  Indeed, there is very little to suggest that Watts' scramblers are simply intelligence without self-awareness; even the torturous quizzing does not necessarily support that conclusion, although it points to a different type of self-awareness than what a typical human experiences.

It's an interesting treatise on consciousness.  Very thought-provoking, but when analyzed probably not as profound as one might think initially.
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Offline Mikes

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Re: Peter Watts, 'Blindsight': finally, aliens without the bull****
It's an interesting treatise on consciousness.  Very thought-provoking, but when analyzed probably not as profound as one might think initially.

Recent Neurobiology advances point us into a direction that suggests our consciousness may indeed not be all that it s cracked up to be.

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I shall never tire of underlining a concise little fact which these superstitious people are loath to admit - namely, that a thought comes when "it" wants, not when "I" want....           - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.


I found Blindsight to be an extremely powerful exploration of the implications derived from the potential *real* nature of our consciousness.
« Last Edit: April 16, 2011, 06:11:37 pm by Mikes »

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Peter Watts, 'Blindsight': finally, aliens without the bull****
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I have a beef:  even with the big AI reveal at the end, the characteristics attributed to Sarasti throughout the narrative do not jive with the premise that the vampires are either manifestations or on their way to becoming a non-conscious intellectual species.

I think part of it is the idea that they have learned to very carefully mimic their prey, so they still appear behaviorally conscious.

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and then we're just supposed to accept the leap that comes near the end (insurrection).  Not so impressed on that score; Sarasti was the most interesting character by far, and then it just fizzled.

There wasn't so much an insurrection as
Spoiler:
sabotage; Rorschach was able to induce a new personality in the Gang to its own specifications.

However I did think the climax was very messy and should have had a few more editing passes.

 

Offline MP-Ryan

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Re: Peter Watts, 'Blindsight': finally, aliens without the bull****
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I have a beef:  even with the big AI reveal at the end, the characteristics attributed to Sarasti throughout the narrative do not jive with the premise that the vampires are either manifestations or on their way to becoming a non-conscious intellectual species.

I think part of it is the idea that they have learned to very carefully mimic their prey, so they still appear behaviorally conscious.

That's splitting hairs, and goes back to my musings at the end of my post - if something appears behaviourally conscious, then it is.  Consciousness/self-awareness/sentience is a really poorly-used device [in behavioural genetics and biopsych] because it's designed to compare everything to a baseline human experience.  We happen to attribute our involuntary, feedback-programmed biological reactions to free will and conscious thought, but they aren't actually a product of conscious thought.  Rather, consciousness justifies itself by creating that free will illusion.  Nothing in the description of vampires contradicts that.  Rather, Sarasti appears to simply have a better grasp of what consciousness actually is, and fewer illusions about its importance.  But if Sarasti isn't a conscious being, then neither are the human members of the crew.

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There wasn't so much an insurrection as

I was referring to the
Spoiler:
vampire insurrection that reportedly took place back on Earth while Siri was on his way back in the shuttle.  It really did come from nowhere.
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: Peter Watts, 'Blindsight': finally, aliens without the bull****
Oh I didn't think it came out of nowhere, the foreshadowing was just pretty subtle. Siri's dad was constantly being called all over the globe with 'problems', and I recall a bunch of grim things he sort of said or hinted at which made me think something big was going wrong.

 

Offline MP-Ryan

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Re: Peter Watts, 'Blindsight': finally, aliens without the bull****
Oh I didn't think it came out of nowhere, the foreshadowing was just pretty subtle. Siri's dad was constantly being called all over the globe with 'problems', and I recall a bunch of grim things he sort of said or hinted at which made me think something big was going wrong.

Hrmmm.  I didn't get that sense of that being the problem, but now that you mention it that's probably the case and I just missed the subtle foreshadowing.  It's unfortunate that Watts didn't give us a scope of the vampire resurrection.
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