Blindspot by Peter Watts

[CarpeDiem]

I'm not at all a SciFi avid reader (and not a SciFi reader either), and stumbled onto this book practically out of nowhere, but there is something that hit me here:

Combined Review: Canadian author Watts (Starfish) explores the nature of consciousness in this stimulating hard SF novel, which combines riveting action with a fascinating alien environment. In 2082, when something alien is discovered beyond the edge of the solar system, with utopia waiting just down the electronic pipeline in a virtual domain called Heaven, Earth experiences the sudden shock of a baffling extraterrestrial visitation in the form of bright probes that surround the globe. Within days, the lights vanish, leaving only a faint signal of outbound communication near the Kuiper belt. the spaceship Theseus sets out to make contact. Led by an enigmatic AI and a genetically engineered spectral captain whose genetic code incorporates vampirism, the crew includes a biologist who's more machine than human, a linguist with surgically induced multiple personality disorder, a professional soldier who's a pacifist, and Siri Keeton, a man with only half a brain. Keeton is virtually incapable of empathy, but he has a savant's ability to model and predict the actions of others without understanding them. Once the Theseus arrives at the gigantic and hideously dangerous alien artifact (which has tellingly self-named itself Rorschach), the crew must deal with beings who speak English fluently but who may, paradoxically, not even be sentient, at least as we understand the term.

From Erin Kissane review:
There's a protagonist with half his brain (the half that enabled empathy, apparently) removed, who makes his living reading other peoples' thoughts and intentions through close observation. Imagine a younger, colder, more focused Sherlock Holmes and then take away the drama queen tendencies, the social skills, and the cozy Victoriana; the part that's left might feel a bit like Siri. There are the intricately damaged altered-brain characters you might expect from Watts if you've read the rifters books. There's the space vampire who out-baddasses every other vampire I've ever encountered in a novel, and I know from vampire books. No gothy romantic hero here -- just a creature who has out-evolved you so thoroughly you can't even get your head around it.

Now let's talk about the ideas. Blindsight takes on the evolutionary benefits of sociopathic behavior, and the ethics of torture, the puzzle of sentience, and what it means to intentionally develop a simulacrum of empathy and conscience (and whether it's worthwhile to do so). These ideas have been explored elsewhere, but I've never seen it done so well. Blindsight isn't *about* aliens or vampires or the future of technology. It's about us: our moral choices, our short cultural attention spans, the mental shortcuts we use so we can function, and what happens when our reach exceeds our evolutionary grasp.

And, the last, but not the least, this SciFi novel has bibliography list and footnotes!

What 'got' me besides sociopathic cyborg, is the name of the spaceship:
from the latest exchange between Henry and Archer on Fulcanelli plates thread

Hi Archer,

If you have the first edition of Le Mystere, might I ask you to check a passage for me. In the first chapter, section five, there is a paragraph (p. 63 in the third edition) that starts off:

"Notre intention n'est point d'ecrire, comme le fit Batsdorff, un trait special pour enseigner ce qu'est le fil d'Ariane, qui permit These d'accomplir son dessein."

The English translation, taken from the second edition, says "Perseus", not Theseus. My question is which name is cited in the first or second editions.

Thanks for yor help.

Henry

Hi Henry

I checked all French Editions: These is the right name.

Best,

ARCHER

Kind of strange...

Did someone read this novel?

 

[Azur]

Carpe,

I'm in the middle of reading this book. It came highly recommended to me by someone, one of the few, people that I know that sees things a little deeper than most.

BTW, a small correction: the title is "Blindsight".

And it is legally available for download here (as part of a "creative commons"):

_http://www.rifters.com/blindsight/BS_main.htm

It's a little grim, apparently, but not done for a thrill, more on the level of the "terror of the situation" according to the recommender mentioned above.


[post edit]

Here's a sample passage, and there's a lot like this:

I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center.
I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain.
I am the curtain.
I am not an entirely new breed. My roots reach back to the dawn
of civilization but those precursors served a different function, a
less honorable one. They only greased the wheels of social
stability; they would sugarcoat unpleasant truths, or inflate
imaginary bogeymen for political expedience. They were vital
enough in their way. Not even the most heavily-armed police state
can exert brute force on all of its citizens all of the time. Meme
management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of
perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.
There have always been those tasked with the rotation of
informational topologies, but throughout most of history they had
little to do with increasing its clarity.

Cheers.

 

[CarpeDiem]

Heck!! Quite a peculiar and creative way to edit post-2001 transcripts and in the end to give them away gratis legally! What the ultimate writer whereabouts might be? It could be only only of those 10% inspiration and 90% -perspiration Great Works... Is it for those who is interested in 2002 - 2005/6 unreleased Cs transcripts, it is a must read?

 

[CarpeDiem]

Whole minuscule methinks better checkout right now!

This quote looks like the Dorothy message to the Wizard of Oz:

Five years ago you destroyed the world.
The world had it coming.
So you brought back a gift from the deep sea, a doomsday microbe to throw the planet on its side. Now DNA itself is on the way out. North America lies in ruins beneath the thumb of an omnipotent psychopath. Governments across the globe have fallen; warlords and suicide cults have risen from the ashes. All because five years ago, you had a score to settle.

But you've discovered something in the meantime: you destroyed the world on false pretenses.

For years now you've cowered among the mountains of the deep Atlantic. But you cannot hide forever. The consequences of past acts reach inexorably to the very bottom of the world a�" and suddenly, even here, there's no way to take back the body count.

One way or another, you're about to face the mess you made

Guys, did you check this site??

Autopsy findings:
Blood:
- core capillary proliferation (blood reservoirs)
- elevated intracellular ATP
- anomalous blood chemistry (leuenkephalin)
- hightened resistance to prion diseases
Brain: Hypertrophied amygdale, visual cortex
Neurological isolation to ACG
Retinal selectivity, cross-wiring

FizerPharm a�" Flexible ethics for a complex World

on prions -
http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/prusiner/245.dtl
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/000639.html
http://www.accessexcellence.org/WN/SU/prions2k.html
http://www.accessexcellence.org/WN/SUA08/mcow10.html
http://www.appliedbiosystems.com/biobeat/prion/#top
http://www.cherrybyte.org/Articles/Agriculture/madcows/cows.html

Azur, where exactly quoted sample passage is from? I didn't find it on site.
Your 'cheers' in the end - is about what? Do you think this hell is funny?

Mecheers, as after a pause i did find the parent directory, wherefrom one can download his e-books and articles gratis.
_http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/

Maelstrom has the dedication: For Laurie
"Though she be but little, she is fierce."
You better kill me, but it stems from qfg!

 

[Azur]

Heck!! Quite a peculiar and creative way to edit post-2001 transcripts and in the end to give them away gratis legally! What the ultimate writer whereabouts might be? It could be only only of those 10% inspiration and 90% -perspiration Great Works... Is it for those who is interested in 2002 - 2005/6 unreleased Cs transcripts, it is a must read?

Carpe,

I'm a little lost with what you are saying here. Could you elaborate?

Thanks.

 

[Azur]

Azur, where exactly quoted sample passage is from? I didn't find it on site.
Your 'cheers' in the end - is about what? Do you think this hell is funny?

Mecheers, as after a pause i did find the parent directory, wherefrom one can download his e-books and articles gratis.
_http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/

Maelstrom has the dedication: For Laurie
"Though she be but little, she is fierce."
You better kill me, but it stems from qfg!

Carpe,

The quote I provided was from the Blindsight book, page 35.

As for "Cheers", I simply use it (automatically) as a sign-off, nothing more. I could simply finish with "A" or something else. There is no intrinsic meaning when I say "Cheers". I could easily say 'To your health" instead.

As for finding this Hell funny, I most certainly don't. If you knew me better, this would become evident in a hurry.

All the best.

 

[CarpeDiem]

Sorry, Azur, for overreacting to 'cheers' that site info is so...explosive (even if sci-fi) and footnoted, that i'm competely thrown out of reels with it.
About 'creative way' of presenting transcripts idea, it's my speculation, if you type 'wizard of Oz', and 'man behind the curtain' in the search box, it quickly drives you to cass site. Dedication to 'Laurie' in the beginning of Maelstrom is interesting too. I downloaded books and articles and am impatient to read it. Have to finish with Lisa transcript i'm typing right now. Whether i'm 'right' or 'wrong' in cass association speculation, whatever it is, this site is extraordinary, really extraordinary! I really don't have an idea how i got to this book, because i was reading some clinical psychology book on-line in russian about developmental stages when different forms of psychopathy reveal themselves, i think i will have to post on it, and then i got to this book just in one click somehow. Go figure!

 

[Azur]

Sorry, Azur, for overreacting to 'cheers' that site info is so...explosive (even if sci-fi) and footnoted, that i'm competely thrown out of reels with it.
About 'creative way' of presenting transcripts idea, it's my speculation, if you type 'wizard of Oz', and 'man behind the curtain' in the search box, it quickly drives you to cass site. Dedication to 'Laurie' in the beginning of Maelstrom is interesting too. I downloaded books and articles and am impatient to read it. Have to finish with Lisa transcript i'm typing right now. Whether i'm 'right' or 'wrong' in cass association speculation, whatever it is, this site is extraordinary, really extraordinary! I really don't have an idea how i got to this book, because i was reading some clinical psychology book on-line in russian about developmental stages when different forms of psychopathy reveal themselves, i think i will have to post on it, and then i got to this book just in one click somehow. Go figure!

Yes, he's got some really good links in his references. In fact, this book so far isn't as grim as I imagined it would be. Some of the links referenced (scientific studies) are WAY more grim than his story.

As for finding the book, sometimes books have a way of "falling off the shelf" at appropriate times. This could be a bad coincidence or a good coincidence, but it's something.

To your health and continued growth! :D

 

[Azur]

I thought maybe it would be worthwhile to post a section of notes by this author relating to his findings that drove the makeup of his Blindsight novel.

From _http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm (scroll to down "Blindsight Notes and References").

Sleight of Mind

The Human sensorium is remarkably easy to hack; our visual system has been described as an improvised "bag of tricks"13 at best. Our sense organs acquire such fragmentary, imperfect input that the brain has to interpret their data using rules of probability rather than direct perception14. It doesn't so much see the world as make an educated guess about it. As a result, "improbable" stimuli tends to go unprocessed at the conscious level, no matter how strong the input. We tend to simply ignore sights and sound that don't fit with our worldview.

Sarasti was right: Rorschach wouldn't do anything to you that you don't already do to yourself.

For example, the invisibility trick of that young, dumb scramblera

 

[Azur]

Taking a break from other readings, I picked up this book again, and came across this passage:

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? [...] 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.

 

[Azur]

Another fantastic snippet from this book.

Below is a conversation between characters, sound familiar?

"It doesn't bug you?" Sascha was saying. "Thinking that your mind, the very thing that makes you you, is nothing but some kind of parasite?"

"Forget about minds," he told her. "Say you've got a device designed to monitor—oh, cosmic rays, say. What happens when you turn its sensor around so it's not pointing at the sky anymore, but at its own guts?" He answered himself before she could: "It does what it's built to. It measures cosmic rays, even though it's not looking at them any more. It parses its own circuitry in terms of cosmic-ray metaphors, because those feel right, because they feel natural, because it can't look at things any other way. But it's the wrong metaphor. So the system misunderstands everything about itself. Maybe that's not a grand and glorious evolutionary leap after all. Maybe it's just a design flaw."

"But you're the biologist. You know Mom was right better'n anyone. Brain's a big glucose hog. Everything it does costs through the nose."

"True enough," Cunningham admitted.

"So sentience has gotta be good for something, then. Because it's expensive, and if it sucks up energy without doing anything useful then evolution's gonna weed it out just like that."

"Maybe it did." He paused long enough to chew food or suck smoke. "Chimpanzees are smarter than Orangutans, did you know that? Higher encephalisation quotient. Yet they can't always recognize themselves in a mirror. Orangs can."

"So what's your point? Smarter animal, less self-awareness? Chimpanzees are becoming nonsentient?"

"Or they were, before we stopped everything in its tracks."

"So why didn't that happen to us?"

"What makes you think it didn't?"

It was such an obviously stupid question that Sascha didn't have an answer for it. I could imagine her gaping in the silence.

"You're not thinking this through," Cunningham said. "We're not talking about some kind of zombie lurching around with its arms stretched out, spouting mathematical theorems. A smart automaton would blend in. It would observe those around it, mimic their behavior, act just like everyone else. All the while completely unaware of what it was doing. Unaware even of its own existence."

"Why would it bother? What would motivate it?"

"As long as you pull your hand away from an open flame, who cares whether you do it because it hurts or because some feedback algorithm says withdraw if heat flux exceeds critical T? Natural selection doesn't care about motives. If impersonating something increases fitness, then nature will select good impersonators over
bad ones. Keep it up long enough and no conscious being would be able to pick your zombie out of a crowd." [...] "It'll even be able to participate in a conversation like this one. It could write letters home, impersonate real human feelings, without having the slightest awareness of its own existence."

"I dunno, Rob. It just seems—"

"Oh, it might not be perfect. It might be a bit redundant, or resort to the occasional expository infodump. But even real people do that, don't they?"

"And eventually, there aren't any real people left. Just robots pretending to give a shit."

"Perhaps. Depends on the population dynamics, among other things. But I'd guess that at least one thing an automaton lacks is empathy; if you can't feel, you can't really relate to something that does, even if you act as though you do. Which makes it interesting to note how many sociopaths show up in the world's upper echelons, hmm? How ruthlessness and bottom-line self-interest are so lauded up in the stratosphere, while anyone showing those traits at ground level gets carted off into detention with the Realists. Almost as if society itself is being reshaped from the inside out."


"Oh, come on. Society was always pretty— wait, you're saying the world's corporate elite are nonsentient?"

"God, no. Not nearly. Maybe they're just starting down that road. Like chimpanzees."

"Yeah, but sociopaths don't blend in well."

"Maybe the ones that get diagnosed don't, but by definition they're the bottom of the class. The others are too smart to get caught, and real automatons would do even better. Besides, when you get powerful enough, you don't need to act like other people. Other people start acting like you."

Sascha whistled. "Wow. Perfect play-actor."

"Or not so perfect. Sound like anyone we know?"