Blindsight (Watts Novel)
en.wikipedia.orgThis is one of my favorite books and it's fun to read for anyone interested in the AI consciousness debate. https://hpmorpodcast.com/blindsided-00-announcement/ is a podcast that read the book last year. And https://blindsight.space/ is a Watts' approved website that has a short film/movie trailer for the book.
I feel like the book cheats a little bit. On the one hand, it really wants to explore the p-zombie question, which is (roughly) "imagine there were a non-conscious being that, from the outside, could do everything a conscious one could do." Then, to drive the plot forward, it needs to posit that the non-conscious and conscious beings are actually radically different in their external actions and capabilities. At one point there's a Chinese Room that's obviously non-conscious, but the whole point of the Chinese Room hypothesis is that you can't easily tell the difference from the words it produces.
The marginal / ancillary discussion of the usefulness of people in a post GAI world was really interesting. The best part of this discussion was that the protagonists entire job is to translate ideas that are too hard to understand into a tangible/actionalbe "surface area". Essentially - a policy-maker interface that treats superintelligence as a "black box".
I have an excerpt of the book explaining this here: https://jodavaho.io/posts/books-blindsight.html
The discussion about non-conscious intelligence was less so (I see ants every day!). But this is a new idea dense book to say the least - if you love worldbuilding, please pick it up.
> you hire people like me, the crossbred progeny of profilers and proof assistants and information theorists
> in formal settings you’d call me a synthesist
> on the street you’d call me jargonaut or poppy
> if you’re one of the savants whose hard-won truths are being bastardized or lobotomized by powerful know-nothings interested in only market share you might call me a mole, or a chaperone
Prescient words, for all of us.
And the authors blog/website is: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/
Imo Greg Egan's Permutation City is a far more interesting exploration of consciousness.
Permutation City is not "far more interesting", it is a complementary exploration of consciousness and the nature of reality. Both are excellent (also both very relevant i-pumps). Permanence by Karl Schroeder is another really good complementary exploration of the idea of consciousness as transitory, a symptom of not being good at the thing that is being consciously cogitated. A cat is so good at being a cat, it does not need to waste resources on clumsy meta-aware calculations on how to cat.
I enjoyed the book but I couldn’t quite suspend my disbelief on the central conceit that you could scramble a simulation temporally and still have something like consciousness or experience. Physics has an arrow of time, and rules of how one state transitions to the next, and I can’t really grasp how you could interpose later frames of reality into earlier time slots and still have a meaningful representation of reality.
Also Greg Egan's "Learning to be me" and "Closer"
In general, I can recommend every book by Greg Egan. Especially Incandescence, which really struck me as a great piece of hard sci-fi.
100%, also: Diaspora. <3 Greg Egan.
Second book echopraxia is good too
Blindsight is probably my favorite novel, and I liked echopraxia fine but it was definitely of a different class to me. The worst parts of blindsight are Watts' descriptives (where is everyone right know? What does this area look like? What actions are currently happening?) and Echopraxia suffers from this even more than Blindsight already did.
Echopraxia could have been so great but missed for me. It felt rushed or under-implemented.
I loved Blindsight, but Echopraxia lost me at numerous points. I'll need to go back and re-read.
I read Blindsight long before modern LLM AI came about and at the time I thought the aliens being intelligent without being conscious was fascinating and gave me a different perspective that those things could be separated but it didn't have and direct application.
Learning how modern AI's respond immediately made me think about how Rorschach was communicating with the crew and how current LLM AI's might be considered intelligent while not conscious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)#Consc...
How do you even know that LLMs are not conscious?
I've just skimmed the Wikipedia entry you linked:
So it turns out I'm not conscious either and incapable of semantic understanding, because I've ignored the ambiguities too. Though note that parsing ambiguous sentences used to be exactly what pre-LLM AIs could not do, and what we thought of as requiring real understanding. The exact opposite of what Watts seems to claim.the linguist realizes that the alien creatures cannot be, in fact, conscious because of their lack of semantic understanding: "Our cousins lie about the family tree," Sascha replied, "with nieces and nephews and Neanderthals. We do not like annoying cousins." "We'd like to know about this tree." Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? "It couldn't have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them."They can’t, because consciousness is ill defined. It means something different to every person that engages in this debate.
A Chinese Room that isn't one.
> So it turns out I'm not conscious either
That is an option. I think we are philosophical zombies a decent chunk of the time. Constant self awareness and mindfulness are calorically expensive. No reason consciousness has to be continuous.
Could be. However note that any current LLM passes this ambiguity parsing test with flying colors- both the implicit choice of the most probable meaning and the subsequent reflection on all the possible alternatives- so if that proved anything it would mean that they're conscious too.
This is one of the books that left me with the most profound sense of unease. And it deserves very high prait for being able to do that.
While people might remember it for other more striking ideas, I was impressed with how it expounds the theory behind the claims that "intelligence implies violence". That entire narrative was quite chilling.
That, and the way the author explains how to establish a means of communication using just... pain.
It's a brilliant book.
It's interesting that "story of your life" By Ted Chiang has also military meeting aliens whom are squids and the process of developing understanding is very very different. One tries to find common understanding, the other uses torture.
Peter Watts has a very dark view of humanity.
> intelligence implies violence
Feels like a precursor to the Dark Forest theory.
Another very unoriginal and shallow work.
Assuming sarcasm.
The Three Body Trilogy was absolutely packed with fantastic and original ideas, and explained/presented in ways that flowed well with the story. That's how I found it anyway. I very much enjoyed all three Three Body Problem books. Also very much enjoyed Blindsight.
If not sarcasm, I feel sorry for your not being able to extract joy from any of those books, and hope there are others that tickle your fancy that maybe the HN readership might like to know about. Going by your email address, I'd guess that maybe Accelerando might do it?
I only read the first book of the trilogy and the "science" in it was so profoundly absurd that I couldn't motivate myself to read any further. I think part of the issue is that it had been sold to me under the guise that it was hard sci-fi, and it was anything but.
I disagree it's unoriginal, though. It's pretty original, you just have to be prepared to suspend your disbelief (it's kind of on me that I wasn't when I read it).
I read it every couple of years and it makes me feel weird for several weeks at a time. Like nothing is real, nothing matters, I'm not really here. I eventually snap out of it, but it's an odd feeling.
There's a quote from James D. Nicoll, "Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts."
It's the closest thing to an infohazard that I know.
its a way overhyped book. It is not hard sci-fi at all. (Leader of the crew?!). And its imposes some questionable ideas about consciousness. Its edgy and its prose is not good. The characters are bland. I bought it, as it comes up quite often on reddit and HN. But for me it was totally not worth it. Just my 2cents.
I agree that Blindsight is highly overrated. Peter Watts devotes much of the book to ridiculous dialogue about the Chinese Room Experiment (astronauts in space apparently have nothing better to do than poorly discuss undergrad philosophy apparently).
The treatment of the Chinese Room Experiment is shallow and Watts clearly does not possess a more than rudimentary grasp of the philosophy, nor of computer science apparently.
It also felt shoehorned in. As was the vampire subplot, as other commentators have already discussed.
Felt like Watts just wanted to add in the Chinese Room Argument to make the novel seem "deep", when in fact it accomplished the exact opposite. No computer scientist that I know of takes the Chinese Room argument seriously, Scott Aaronson had a Quora answer where he mentioned how when he presented it to his undergrad class none of the students found it convincing, even after he tried to present arguments for it.
I don't like most of John Searle's work in general, but his Chinese Room Argument is obviously one of the worst pieces of philosophy of the 20th century, on par with the worst of the works ridiculed by Sokal et al.
When I was younger, I thought the Chinese room argument was ridiculously wrong. Any system that could do what it could do would have to be conscious.
Now with the rise of LLMs, I have to say that I was completely wrong. LLMs give us a simulation of consciousness, but they aren't conscious. My mistake was thinking that language was the hallmark of consciousness, which I no longer believe. It seems obvious to me that other mammals are conscious, even without language. Language is orthogonal to consciousness.
I still believe that there is nothing magical about biology that means that a computer program could never be conscious, though.
Post on a board, deeply in a love/hate relationship with chinese rooms and regularly ascribing consciousness, emotions and personalitys to said chinese rooms.
As someone who literally studied consciousness and perceptual neuroscience in grad school, and ran studies on real-life blindsight patient GY, you couldn't be more mistaken about the Chinese Room's relevance.
The original formulation is awkward to modern ears, but the heart of the problem remains: How does/can consciousness emerge from smaller unconscious parts?
A single neuron can be modeled with a physics simulation, and is clearly not conscious. But at what size/configuration does a group of neurons become conscious?
"No computer scientist that I know of takes the Chinese Room argument seriously" Well, you now know one who spent years of his life studying consciousness.
Also, why would you even assume a priori that computer scientists have any worthwhile insights on the topic of consciousness? It's a completely different field. (I swear, the denigration of non-CS expertise on HN is maddening, as is the idea that every programmer is secretly a Renaissance polymath.)
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What's funny is I read Blindsight in grad school, and also dislike it, but for very different reasons. A much better criticism is Watts's idea that human consciousness is useless or detrimental, because the aliens don't have it and don't need it.
First, the idea that consciousness confers no advantages is odd. The very word "blindsight" refers to doing a task without conscious awareness, but I can tell you from the zillion studies done on GY, blindsight task performance is nowhere near as good as sighted performance. Given Watts named his book after that, you'd think he might have known more about it.
Second, the book rests on the assumption that consciousness is cheap enough that its metabolic costs are irrelevant.
I don't recall if Watts states this explicitly, but I think the idea was that humans were the local maxima on earth due to other, non-consciousness advantages, and that most life in the galaxy didn't use it.
The problem is the brain is an incredibly expensive organ to maintain, consuming a huge fraction of our energy budget to maintain homeostasis. Forget the galaxy, if consciousness had no benefits (or was actively detrimental), then a sapiens variant without it on earth might easily out-compete the conscious variant and spread.
> As someone who literally studied consciousness and perceptual neuroscience in grad school, and ran studies on real-life blindsight patient GY, you couldn't be more mistaken about the Chinese Room's relevance.
> The original formulation is awkward to modern ears, but the heart of the problem remains: How does/can consciousness emerge from smaller unconscious parts?
> A single neuron can be modeled with a physics simulation, and is clearly not conscious. But at what size/configuration does a group of neurons become conscious?
This is clearly not the Chinese Room Argument. The Chinese Room Argument was supposed to prove that computers will never be capable of consciousness simply by following rules written down in a book. It was directed at symbolic AI systems that literally were just computers following rules in a book. Modern deep neural networks as well as human brains clearly don't function anything like that.
The idea that computers can't think is clearly based on irrational prejudice against electronic technology. Why can't a computer gain consciousness by simulating a human brain? John Searle himself said that consciousness requires "organic substrate" without any elaboration. Taken in context it's clear that the Chinese Room Argument was fundamentally clearly and obviously just motivated out of an irrational bias and prejudice against electronic/non-organic substrates.
> Forget the galaxy, if consciousness had no benefits (or was actively detrimental), then a sapiens variant without it on earth might easily out-compete the conscious variant and spread
Isn't this pretty much what happens with the vampires? I know they're not completely non-conscious but they're clearly supposed to be somewhere between humans and Rorschach.
I think if he had argued that consciousness was a "transitional power source for intelligent behavior" it would all be cleaner. It is and was useful, but eventually becomes a bottleneck.
> It is not hard sci-fi at all
What do you consider hard SF? That term doesn't have a real definition and everyone's conception is different. But I think it's unreasonable to say that Blindsight is not hard at all. On the spectrum of SF, it clearly leans way more towards the hard side.
Or, put another way, if Blindsight is not hard science fiction to you, then I think your criteria for hardness is far beyond almost everyone else's.
Yeah, I found the writing really hard to follow. And it was really difficult to visualise any scene due to how complicated it all was.
I was surprised it's recommended so much.
Who reads hard-scifi for the characters? I have seen so many mangled and mongrel -revamps of concept books after the nebula hit- and they all suffer for it. SciFi characters are "probes" slammed and slicde into an idea- they are not there to be interesting and entertain, they are one-dimensional scalpels to vivisect a effect and then be disposed. I thoroughly hate this notion that every "great book" has to be life up to the ulysses or similar great interior models of character. Stop damaging the field with your nonsense demands!
SF also stands for 'Speculative Fiction' - which takes an unusualy premise or assumption, and prods and pokes int and tries to get some interesting thinking and an enjoyable, suprising story out of it.
Blindsight is literally:
We went to the macguffin in a spaceship, and a bunch of unrelated stuff happened along the way, then when opening up the macguffin like a fortune cookie, "big idea" was written on a slip of paper inside, and we had our minds blown. The end.
Good characters are rare in hard sci-fi, but I do find it frustrating when (human) characters do illogical or inhuman things, just to move the plot forward. Arthur C. Clarke's characters were cardboard cutouts, but at least they didn't act like weirdos just so the humans could get aboard Rama.
Well, the paper-cut-out- deus-ex-machina breaking the immersion is real and despised, rightfully so.
Where would you rank https://revelationspace.fandom.com/wiki/Dan_Sylveste - who is literally infested by a plot-device?
I tend to agree, it's not for me. Objective 'goodness' I will not assess. But it's barely sci-fi. More of a Eldridge horror book awkwardly set in space, with... vampires? Scientifically defensible vampires
Agreed. Does anyone have suggestions for non-grimdark modern sci-fi? Something hopeful that imagines what a good AI future could look like? Do optimistic people not write novels anymore?
Iain M Banks Culture series would be the obvious one.
Also Children Of Time which I see another commenter got downvoted into oblivion for. Its optimisitic and it definitely involves AI. Also one of the most lauded sci fi novels of the last decade.
Edit: also Slow Gods by Catherine Webb fits your criteria and is very good
While I would agree that the Culture series does give a positive view of AI the novels themselves do have quite a lot of rather dark elements...
I've read the first few and I think they qualify.
Right, there's dark elements and the Culture does its best to fix them or counter them, with all the complications and tricky ethical considerations you might expect. Thats kindof the point of the series? Commenter above asked for optimism, not "books where nothing bad happens".
> Culture series
Where the humans are the pets and the (machine) Minds are the real protagonists, in control of everything?
Where the machines have crafted a language that affects the way people think, aligning them better with what the machines wanted?
That's your utopia?
I do hope you don't work for any frontier AI lab!
Are you an Idiran? You lost guys, put your (three) feet up and get over it.
Yes finally. While I fully accept the possibility Im just too thick to get it, I never understood the hype. I found it a slog to get through, despite it not being too thick.
It's one of those 'they showed the plot in the trailer' but for books instead of movies. It barely elaborates on the central idea, which it basically withholds as the 'big reveal'. Which works about as well as the Star Wars prequels did with the revelation that Palpatine was evil all along.
The characters are deliberately written to be as unrelatable as possible, yet its full of boring character drama between these dysfunctional people. It fails as 'big idea' scifi, and fails as an actual enjoyable book.
I felt like it was a collection of interesting ideas (not necessarily good but at least fairly unique) placed on a straight line. For me it was a worthy read because I don't necessarily need stories to be twisted in a pretzel. I also firmly believe that any feeling of getting any wiser through literature is illusory because narratives always lie. What I expect from literature is just a bunch of things I haven't yet seen, because the older I am, the more repetitive everything I see becomes. And for that Blindsight delivered.
I very strongly connected with a single idea from the book, that trying to decode random bits of information requires one to waste resources and therefore can be considered an attack. Every time I try to read a message that comes from an LLM, my brain hurts almost physically, trying to detemine whether it was posted by a human or a meatproxy.
Same! This is the idea that I cite most often from the book. Although, in the context of the book it was ordinary human entertainment broadcasts and radio chitchat which the aliens determined to be devoid of survival value and therefore an obvious resource-wasting attack.
I liked the ideas in Blindsight more than I liked the book. The writing is heavy-handed (trying to be gentle here), especially given how interesting the underlying questions were.
Yup. Very interesting ideas. Almost unreadable at times. I've read 1 or 2 other Watts books since reading Blindsight and the others are the same.
Agree. Near the end of the book I was starting to skim pages
Yeah, the end was in desperate need of another editing pass. He takes you by the head, smashes your face into the ground, and then drags you for half a mile.
Anyone who gets that far into the book doesn't need to have their hand held that much. I get that it's the entire point of the book, but everything until this point has been a challenging read.
Personally, I think it might have been interesting to rewrite the whole thing such that conclusion is ambiguous.
Blindsight is fantastic. The sequel, Echopraxia, is also excellent; it is very different, and I expect many people were disappointed that it wasn't just more of the same.
Also a big shout out to his less well-known novel, The Freeze Frame Revolution. It's about the crew of a "stargate"-seeding spaceship trying to stop the ship's AI, but being hampered by the fact that the AI is both near-omniscient and that they only work in short shifts before being put back in hibernation. He also wrote a handful of short stories set before and after the novel.
There's something very refreshingly direct, unvarnished, no-nonsense, and clear-eyed (some would say cynical) about Watts' style of writing. His prose tends to be tough (quite like early Gibson's noir style, with the punk attitude intact), but also beautifully cinematic. The only other write that I think comes close, aside from Gibson, is Dan Simmons with his Hyperion Cantos, but he's not nearly as darkly cynical.
Leaving aside "which book is better" (which is hard to answer), I'll say that The Freeze Frame Revolution is much more approachable for most folks. It's the one I'd recommend to my friends first, then I might recommend Blindsight if they liked it - along with other difficult to articulate factors. Perhaps the "recommend/don't recommend" choice is arrived at by non-conscious mechanisms ;)
I did not enjoy this book. It felt too try-hard edgy. If they dropped the vampire it would have been better.
Edit: another thing I didn't like was how the author just dumped pages and pages of his character-notes as background information for that character. At least that's how it felt on the multi-page flashback digressions. I skipped pages and pages of the book because it was irrelevant to the story.
The writing definitely felt try-hard, especially at the start where the first few chapters seem really obscure by design.
Also, while I enjoyed the philosophy, as someone who has also read all of Oliver Sacks's books and took several philosophy of mind courses in college, it really felt like he just wanted to put in every cool Oliver Sacks-ian case study he had ever read.
But they were also added in without much context. In my book club (of intelligent people) I had to re-explain nearly all of them, e.g. the blindsight scene (from which the title comes from) is practically the entire thesis, but if you haven't heard of it before you can miss it.
For a dissenting opinion: boring, marginally pretentious book. Tries to bring up some interesting ideas, but loses the plot along the way. Also random Dracula in space. Couldn't get myself to finish it.
Watts did a whole academic presentation on the science of vampirism in the book's context. It's a fun watch and makes it feel much less random. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEOUaJW05bU
If you want a really shoehorned scifi vampire, there's a David Weber book in which it comes out of fucking nowhere towards the end.
Best explanation for vampires not liking crosses I have ever seen. I always enjoy vampires that are explained scientifically for some reason in fiction, its like some sort of challenge and they usually avoid the whole dislike of crosses, not here, thought it was a decent attempt along with many other ideas in the book, very enjoyable to me.
My favorite explanation for it - and I forget where it's from, but it probably isn't uncommon - is that vampires who were humans raised in Christian cultures believe themselves to be damned by God when they turn because that's what the folklore says, and that belief and self-hatred manifests as a phobic aversion to religious symbolism.
Rings a bell for Netflix’s Stephen Moffat Dracula.
Not bad, think I still prefer that their visual cortex was more advanced such that they could easily perceive multiple perspectives (necker cubes) and maybe even higher dimensions but they had a "crucifixion glitch" such that too much euclidean geometry in the visual field of view caused seizures which doesn't normally occur in nature.
This helped explained their downfall with man creating euclidean geometry everywhere and was taken advantage of when they where brought back as they where very good at certain tasks while also requiring anti seizure drugs which kept them in control.
I felt similar. I finished it but couldn’t finish the sequel. The primary idea was “intelligence can take different shapes” and I kept reading to get insightful descriptions of these different shapes but they never really came. I don’t disagree with the premise it just didn’t really get across the message very well.
> The primary idea was “intelligence can take different shapes”…
IIRC, it was more "intelligence may be a maladaptive dead-end".
The book makes pains to draw a line between consciousness (or meta consciousness) and intelligence. I don't think he really argued that intelligence is maladaptive, but does argue that meta consciousness might be.
Yea I took it as consciousness was maladaptive and sort of a local maxima that humans were trapped in which prevented them from gaining higher intelligences.
Apologies, you're right. I mixed the two up.
No. It was about possibility of intelligence without consciousness.
It felt to me like he wanted to write a treatise on the nature of intelligence and also space vampire fiction and for some reason decided to put them in the same book.
Unfortunately I have to agree with you. I finally got round to this to see what the fuss was about, and was very disappointed. Oblique to the point of baffling and unlikable characters aplenty.
Agreed. Very edgelord-y right off the bat. Couldn't finish it.
The space vampire really felt like an unnecessary add to the entire thing. Could have established similar sci-fi woo-woo with a super-intelligent test-tube baby who might have some lingering trauma from that development.
I think the space vampire was both a bit of fun (in an otherwise bleak novel), but also one of the explorations of different types of mind/consciousness; the mission has a the narrator (with half a brain), a vampire, a person with 4 consciousnesses residing in one brain, a massively-augmented person, a combat specialist who controls a vast set of external peripherals, and an AI (and, of course, the aliens). They're there to make you consider different aspects of what makes up consciousness.
I don't think that would have fit as strongly thematically. Thematically, vampires being ancient, human hunting predators, who are basically the answer to "what happened if you tried creating maximally anti-social humans", and who "accidentally" got wiped out is just another another round in Watt's repeated hammering home the idea that self-awareness/consciousness is not a pinnacle.
The idea that human kind would in its moments of fear and panic reach back and put an anti-social predator in charge is also thematic. In traditional conceptions of hierarchy of "thinking", we would perhaps imagine the self/meta conscious self as being "the top layer", with the layer represented by vampires perhaps being a lower layer (we would imagine it being above "the reptile brain" though). Yet here, humanity (or human command) has chosen to invert the order. The self-awareness layer is capable and does "let go", because while it loves to take the credit for what the mind actually does, it does in fact understand self preservation (generally), and does understand that sometimes, it just needs to... not really be in control.
Final spoilers - and then there's the extra twist which is that the vampire captain was apparently being puppeted by a computer AI system (also implied to be not self aware) the whole time anyways.
So really, we have a pair of non-self aware intelligent systems probing each other. One deploying scramblers, the other deploying the human crew as end effectors.
He definitely a painted a full picture with it. It still felt like it could have been handled differently. "Our test tube babies have their genomes spliced with octopus/ants/amoebas/Judas goats/nematodes - highly intelligent species which lack a sense of self and certain meta cognition."
Can still spin a tale with whatever adjusted sense of self you want without invoking mythical creatures that existed, died off, resurrected, and genetically spliced into humans for space travel.
A long time since I read the book, but I thought the human AIs claimed they could describe a consciousness-optional intelligence, but had not made one. Ergo the meat-puppet controller would have been a conscious AI.
Happy to be corrected on this point because it could partially address what seemed like an oddity to me. There exist super intelligent AIs, but on this incredibly important mission which could define continuing human existence - none of them are in control because AIs make humans uncomfortable. Instead, the AIs secretly operate a meat-puppet predator whose existence makes humans uncomfortable.
The space vampire was fun.
> might have some lingering trauma
Why does every character have to have some trauma? Just because the Oscar committee says so?
Spoilers
All of the characters are weird, super humans with their own problems. At one point, the vampire freaks out and attacks the protagonist. Which leads to some plot ramifications. If you are to maintain that structure, you require a teammate to lose their cool at a pivotal moment when it has been established that the team leader was better and more logical than everyone else.
The in-universe vampire explanation gives a rationale for the scenario. This does not hold if you trivially swap out for a different character, so some kind of hard-wired trigger is required.
This is not a freak out, but instead a calculated move: “Are you in there, Kenton?”
Since his surgery, Keeton has rebuilt his sense of self around observation of human behavior, extraction of patterns into rules, and used those for his Chinese Room. Thus, “Pod Man.” This turned out to be useful in this rapidly evolving society. But Sirasti/Actual Captain need a witness, a human witness, not just a synthesist. The attack collapses Siri’s Chinese Room — the book says as much — and makes him into a Real Boy. Pain, terror, these are experiences, not translations. Like a stellar collapse of a Matryoshka Brain, the dead end black hole of self-referential, all-devouring, navel-gazing consciousness is left behind. Inefficient and alien to most other intelligences, but what is required when you want to launch a pod back to Earth, Siri inside, not Pod Man.
Once you understand who the Captain really was, well, you aren’t looking at Sirasti at all.
Exactly my thought. It's hard to take any sci-fi novel with space vampires seriously.
Blindsight has "space vampires" in much the same way that Lord of the Rings has "crystal balls". (Or Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series has "lesbian necromancers in space".)
This...coming from someone who did finish it. Such meh execution that it continues to baffle me whenever it makes front page.
I'd recommend Lem's _Fiasco_ as thematically related. Very different writing style, obviously.
I just finished rereading Blindsight and Echopraxia for the first time since Echopraxia came out. For a novel that isn't about AI, Blindsight hit me so differently today than it did before AI was mainstream.
I still didn't like Echopraxia though.
What a coincidence, I was about to pick this up but then decided to go with Use of Weapons (Culter #3) instead. Will surely pick this up next!
His Rifters books are great as well. Honestly I've never read anything from Watts that I didn't really like.
Rifters should definitely get more attention. A lot like Stand on Zanzibar, circa forty years later.
On my optimistic days I feel like we are living in a Zanzibar Shockwave Rider future. The rest of the time it feels like Sheep Look Up or Jagged Orbit. Highly recommend John Brunner
Rifters has some very, very yikes moments later on in the series.
If you haven't read the book, beware of spoiler warnings in this thread! It's pretty important in this case.
I read this book and its sequel a few years ago. Interesting conceptual book that touches on some very weird ideas, which I enjoyed. But I wouldn't call it my favorite book. It's not necessarily the easiest to read. Especially the sequel.
Spoiler alert:
The protagonist is a person with severe brain damage that is AI enhanced to become this useful but also severely autistic individual that has no emotions. The novel features also features a genetically engineered vampire with psychopath tendencies. These and a few other characters end up being send on a deep space mission to combat an alien intelligence.
All this obviously requires a bit of suspension of disbelief. But as a psychological take on AI and genetically enhanced intelligence, it touches some interesting topics.
The book is provocative on purpose:
a person with "no emotions" spends pages and pages describing his subjective experience and feelings.
So much more than a normal sci-fi book. I'm not sure how we are supposed to interpret it. That it's all fake? That AI worked well and he's like a normal person, but too obsessed with a question whether it's fake?
"If you can not upgrade, you can not retrain, if you can not retrain you become obsolete within 3 months..."
We can be utterly useless, or we can try and compete against the vampires and the constructs and the AIs. And perhaps you can tell me how to do that without turning into a-an utter freak.” pg. 252
I feel like the people that didn't understand Blindsight are probably better off reading Dungeon Crawler Carl.
What kind of criticism is "no need to have Dracula in space"? The novel is about other types of intelligence, and the question is whether a conscience is necessary for intelligence, a topic that in similar words is discussed every day on this same forum many times a day.
In the book there are normal humans, upgraded humans with severed emotions, there are absolute sociopaths that are still conscious, and there are intelligent aliens with no conscience at all. Were they supposed to be all different alien species? I prefer it this way, there's more variety.
> What kind of criticism is "no need to have Dracula in space"?
It's more of a literary criticism, I think.
I get the vampire is meant to be part of the diversity of human nature in the crew.
The problem for a lot of readers is it's distracting while not adding anything substantial.
It's more like Watts got some glee out of updating vampire mythology in the future, rather than deeply serving the plot. The vampire could have easily been replaced with a genetically-engineered super-smart psychopath, and nothing important would have changed.
The book would have been better if the author had left out this vampire nonesense. All in all, it was a bit of a drag to read. I don't get the hype. It feels a bit like Hamilton, but without the fun!
I saw it as being "read" and rated as 3 out of 5 on my goodreads. But I didn't leave a comment there unfortunately so it took a while to work out why I rated it in such a way. Your vampire comment instantly clicked. I wanted to like it but vampires were too much.
Easily my favorite science fiction novel. And you can read it for free on his website!
http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
My capsule summary:
In the 2070s, on the cusp of the singularity, a swarm of alien drones takes a snapshot of the Earth before burning up in the atmosphere. A small crew of bleeding-edge posthumans, all with different physical or mental augmentations, is sent to the outer Solar System to investigate the source. The narrator, Siri Keeton, is an emotionally lobotomized "synthesist" tasked with monitoring the mission and interpreting it for the leadership back home.
I don't want to spoil its frightening twists, but suffice to say that it shapes up to be a cosmic horror novel where the horror is rooted in abstract ideas like human cognition and the nature of consciousness. The book is peppered with philosophical concepts like the Chinese Room and (real-life) neurological quirks like blindsight, all bent towards smart, existential horror. Like Lovecraft mixed with Oliver Sacks.
And while the ideas are solid -- the author is a marine biologist who fills the appendix with citations of evolutionary and cognitive research -- what I really love is the prose. Watts is a fantastic hard SF writer, filling every page with authentic, charismatic narration, cinematic imagery, and a way of talking about abstruse scientific concepts in a way that punches you in the gut and chills you to the bone. His style is like a horror version of Douglas Adams, mind-bending ideas and memorable characters with a compulsively readable flow to it.
Its biggest weakness is that one of the most compelling aspects sounds like a pulpy joke at first glance -- the ship is led by a "vampire." I can't imagine how many people read this on the jacket and took a hard pass on Dracula in Space. But it's not some fantasy gimmick -- it's the in-universe nickname for an ancient, predatory, sociopathically brilliant subspecies of humanity that's been resurrected, Jurassic Park-style, to help manage high-stakes ventures like the first-contact mission. The captain starts off intriguing, quickly grows frightening, and eventually advances one of the book's most disturbing and unforgettable arguments.
Overall, it's not just my favorite SF novel, but one of my favorite novels, period. The only book I've ever bought a dead-tree copy to be signed by the author. Highly, highly recommended.
I totally agree. Also one of my favorites. It has a real vibe that sticks with you for a while. It’s not just about whether you like the ideas or his particular prose, etc. He put together a complete work that as a whole really captures something unique and really cool.
The "vampire" thing was a bit cheesy to be honest, despite being scientifically explained. But conceptually it was quite key to the story. There would probably have been another way to do this.
Despite that, still one of my all time favorite sci fi books. A fantastic exploration of intelligence, conscioussness and first contact.
The book is layered with ideas and meta-ideas some of which are allusions and need to be deciphered rather than spelled out. Which is also I guess why the “smart idiots” don’t like it or think it’s pretentious and boring. It’s a work that rewards attention and deep contemplation.
Phenomenal deep book with layers upon layers of ideas. Not a easy read read for a single afternoon, this one really requires you to work for your meal; read, go back, reread with new context, ponder.
Probably a bit too heavy on ideas for most and those who are only used to lighter cost might find it boring. But for me one my all time favorite sci-fi books.
First the reading at bayesian conspiracy, now here? Own the novel, it was often hard to read, but kinda worth it for the novel concept introduced.
r/printSF is unconscionably obsessed with this middling work. It's just a collection of "isn't that cool" pop-sci phenomena randomly dropped into an Aliens (1986) space horror plot. Watts in his interviews just comes across as a fanboy hack. Interstellar travel is so difficult that spacefaring aliens must have deliberately set out to do it and are thus conscious! Triffids aren't going to grow their way to Earth!
Isn't the point of the book that the aliens are not at all conscious?
Yes. I hope you can see why that's absurd.
Novelists should not be giving their work away for free like that. AI is bad enough, but writing a novel (even a bad one) is hard work. It just makes it harder for novelists to make a living.
Heh. You picked the absolutely wrong author to say that. His making the book a free download tripled his sales in the first week.
Quoting from:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2enwks/iama_science_f...
So I saw two options. 1: Book tanks, nobody can read it; or 2) book tanks, anyone can read it. I saw no option where Blindsight would ever make money. So what the hell, thought I-- I may die poor, but maybe I won't die completely obscure. Told my editor I was going to set everything free under a Creative Commons license-- it would have broken the contract, but Cory Doctorow had been getting away with it for years and besides, I figured my writing career was pretty much kaput anyway. Editor asked me to wait a month, to see if things turned around. I waited. They didn't. Finis.
The week after I started giving Blindsight away, sales tripled. The rest is history.
Yes, I know that technique. I also know people who go for free books exclusively on Kindle. They don't want to pay for anything. That isn't helpful to people who are selling books in order to help support themselves and undermines the market for new book sales.
I know writers who tried giving their book away for free, and got almost no sales or good reviews afterwards. They aren't all selling terrible books either.
Would you seriously ask a taxi driver to give you free rides before they got paid? Or would you ask a teacher to work for six months unpaid in order to get a couple of years work later on?
I know this mentality is encouraged in some places with interns, but it is a luxury of people who can already support themselves.
I would not ask a taxi driver to give me free rides, but if I could invent and give away magical free teleportation, which would immediately obviate the need for taxi drivers, I would. If I could snap my fingers and conjure the revenants of past plumbers whose existence on the earthly plane served to do nothing but put plumbers out of business by providing services gratis, I'd do that too.
If I were a talented writer and had the ability to produce content as engaging as Peter Watts', I'd put it online for free.
Whatever 'harm' I might do to other authors or taxi drivers or plumbers with this practice is far outweighed by the good that is done to the world by its release.
This reminds me of the book reviewer who was complaining that they tried to pay her in books. She pointed out to her employers that while she loved books, she needed to be able to buy and pay for things.
You can be altruistic as you want, but unless you are a hermit living off the grid in the forest, you will almost certainly have to pay living expenses.
Screw that. People should be able to do whatever they want with their own work. That is what it means to own something.
Are you also opposed to open source software?
Some people are just that brainwashed by the self-centered concept of immediate profit. They're unable to fathom any higher meaning or purpose to life/effort.
Do you tell your plumber or your electrician that they are self-centred when they come around asking to be paid? You might laugh, but that happens. I knew a builder a few years ago who only had half his bill paid, with the result he lost thousands on materials he had bought. It would have cost him a pretty penny going down the legal route. Rich people are often the worst for paying up. Novelists are not paid by the hour and many have to take on other jobs in order to support themselves.
Donna Tartt takes about ten years to write a novel. Some writers take a month or two. It is not an easy task, and very few people can pull it off, let alone in a short time. The internet is full of free music, art and writing, with the result that creative people struggle to support themselves, because they are being undercut, and professional work is being converted into a hobby. The tax authorities, electricity companies, and supermarkets are not interested in whether you are self-centred or not as you put it. They want to be paid. (If you are on unemployment benefit while writing the book, they will demand that you look for other work during that time... Or claim you are able to work.)
> Do you tell your plumber or your electrician that they are self-centred when they come around asking to be paid?
They are free to do with their labour as they please. That includes charging for it. It also includes doing it pro-bono if they feel like it.
The self-centered part is the idea that they would never want to do it pro-bono. Electricians, plumbers do sometimes do work pro-bono if they feel it is a worthy cause. That is what freedom is: the ability to choose for yourself.
> The internet is full of free music, art and writing, with the result that creative people struggle to support themselves, because they are being undercut
were you under the impression that creatives were well paid before the internet?
There is a vast difference between helping an elderly neighbour mow their lawn and dumping lots of free content online. I've been running a writing group for four years now. I'm not paid to do that, and I set it up myself, but it is not putting someone else out of a job, and we support a small business. It also helps the writers, and some of our number have been published and are making sales as a result of being in the group.
It is self-centred to expect everyone to work for you for free. That is why we now have AI destroying creative industries, because it has become normalised not to pay people for using their content.
In parts of Africa the local textile and clothing industries have been destroyed by large amounts of free clothing being offloaded onto them by the developed world. This has been done with good intent, but it means that Africans have been put out of work, and so that they cannot sell their clothes on the international market. If those areas could develop a clothing industry it would bring much needed money into their economy and make them less dependent on onerous bank loans.
"were you under the impression that creatives were well paid before the internet?"
Yes, they were being better paid. Musicians had unions for one. Spotify and YouTube do not pay fair rates for their music, yet rake in from advertising. Old radio stations paid better.
This has been a problem in bars and venues. They tell lies like 'it will look good on your CV/resumé" or "it will get you attention". But if many of them are willing do it unpaid, it means a lot of the pubs won't pay anyone to play.
> It is self-centred to expect everyone to work for you for free.
But literally nobody is suggesting anyone, let alone everyone should be expected to work for free or do anything they don't want to.
> I've been running a writing group for four years now. I'm not paid to do that, and I set it up myself, but it is not putting someone else out of a job
You are competing with people who run paid writing workshops. It puts people out of a job to the same extent as the author posting his book on his website did. I personally think that neither does, but i'm not sure how you can come to the conclusion that one does but not another without being a hypocrite. Hell, you even used teacher as one of your examples in an earlier post.
"But literally nobody is suggesting anyone, let alone everyone should be expected to work for free or do anything they don't want to."
Most people given the choice between something free and something paid for, will go for the free item.
It is not just a matter of consent, but a market for ordinary people to make some money. Being able to work for free means you have to have the time and money to do so, otherwise you risk getting into debt yourself.
"You are competing with people who run paid writing workshops. It puts people out of a job to the same extent as the author posting his book on his website did."
Within thirty years (far longer than my group has been around) I've never witnessed anyone else run writing workshops within my local area who wasn't already working for the local libraries. They still do. So, that isn't the case — the others are all getting paid out of the council tax whether anyone turns up or not. I keep pretty close tabs on such things. At least I've helped other people publish and sell their books. It's helped my friend's café that was struggling financially after the government lockdown and may not have still been here without it. That's helped save her livelihood, and kept someone in work. Because of that she's been able to set up a catering arm. Far better than debt. So yes, it has had a positive impact on the local area, when so many places are turning into ghost towns and deserts.
That is for a short time every week. But I'd prefer not to work for nothing most of the time. I have had debt agencies after me in the past so it is not a luxury I can afford all the time, nor can most people. I have know people who make a living off writing, and many more who can't... But I'd prefer at least some people could. Some of the latter group put their books out for free, they got downloaded and they made little or no sales off that. (Not because they were all awful either.)
You're jumping though hoops to ignore the original point. Maybe try re-reading how this thread began.
Many people on here are normalising the idea of unpaid work. Imagine doing so while having a debt agency after you. It is a luxury to those who have the time and money to do so.
As I have said elsewhere, I know lesser known writers who have released their book for free on Kindle and gained nothing in return. (No reviews but certainly downloads.) All that resulted in was someone getting a free book. It is not a pattern to be encouraged.
> Many people on here are normalising the idea of unpaid work. Imagine doing so while having a debt agency after you. It is a luxury to those who have the time and money to do so.
So? People aren't a monolith. Maybe some can afford to give things away for free. Maybe some are living on the poverty line, but for whatever reason think the tradeoff of spreading something to more people (including those who can't afford to pay for it) is worth it if it means further reach for any number of reasons, including self-serving name recognition or selfless spreading of information they think is important to spread.
> All that resulted in was someone getting a free book. It is not a pattern to be encouraged.
Once again, you're trapped in your mindset and seem entirely blind to the aforementioned profit brainwashing. Other paradigms exist, with many benefits you're apparently still incapable of comprehending.
"Many people" does not imply a monolith. It does sound like there are a lot of rich kids on here though who support this. If you turn a paid job into an unpaid hobby then people can't make a living off it.
"Once again, you're trapped in your mindset and seem entirely blind to the aforementioned profit brainwashing. Other paradigms exist, with many benefits you're apparently still incapable of comprehending."
Tell this to your utility companies and any debt agencies you encounter and see how far you get with it. Try speaking to tax collectors about paradigms, brain washing and mindsets. See if your landlord or mortgage lender will accept a paradigm shift in place of monthly rent.
The only people who can get anywhere with that are people who already have money or some sugar daddy (or mummy.) Many of us have to work to survive. Ever heard of the working class?
> If you turn a paid job into an unpaid hobby then people can't make a living off it.
The invisible hand only applies here if the goods are identical, and since we're talking about unique works like books, they are definitely not equal. What one another charges does not dictate what another author charges.
> The only people who can get anywhere with that are people who already have money or some sugar daddy (or mummy.) Many of us have to work to survive. Ever heard of the working class?
Wow, do you have any idea how many open source software contributors are living on Ramen and are on the side of the working class?
Now I'm curious, are you for or against public libraries? From your arguments, it appears that you would be against?
"Screw that. People should be able to do whatever they want with their own work. That is what it means to own something."
That undermines other novelists who are in most cases making barely any money to begin with. I know people who specifically go for free books in preference to ones they have to pay for.
I submitted an article to a magazine some years ago, which I had spent WEEKS researching. They turned it down and it mysteriously popped up on a blog, uncredited, and only lightly rewritten. I had to threaten legal action. But it was sickening given how much work I had put into it. I am not wealthy, in fact I struggle to pay my life expenses. This year was the first time I was able to take a holiday away from home in several years.
"Are you also opposed to open source software?"
I think people should be paid for work. We have it arse backwards in this society. Parasitic megacorporations get paid exorbitant amounts of money for crappy products through their cartels, and barely pay any tax... Whereas other people are expected to work for nothing. Being able to work for free means that you have the time and money to do so. But unfortunately it means that people expect other people's labour to be for free even though that is not how the economy works.
Companies like Wikimedia, Duolingo, IMDB, social media and so on, are taking unpaid labour and making money off it. Wikimedia Wikimedia got $150M in donations during July 1, 2020—June 30, 2021. 67M wen on salaries, with 9M of it going to management, and apparently pocketed 50M. Needless to say, the bulk of Wikimedia's labour never sees a bolt in compensation.
> I know people who specifically go for free books in preference to ones they have to pay for.
Most people like things that are free. Obviously. I myself make good use of my library card.
> I submitted an article to a magazine some years ago, which I had spent WEEKS researching. They turned it down and it mysteriously popped up on a blog, uncredited, and only lightly rewritten.
That sucks. But is besides the point. The key is consent. You didn't consent to that. The author of this book chose to make it freely available. Just like you are making your comments on hn freely available. its all about choice.
> Wikimedia got $150M in donations during July 1, 2020—June 30, 2021. 67M wen on salaries, with 9M of it going to management, and apparently pocketed 50M. Needless to say, the bulk of Wikimedia's labour never sees a bolt in compensation.
As an active participant in Wikimedia movement, i'm very familiar with it.
Nobody "pocketed it". They keep a reserve for unexpected expenses or if fundraising goes poorly. There are plenty of things you can fault the Wikimedia Foundation for, but this seems like a stupid one. Obviously they are going to keep some money in the bank, just in case something unexpected happens.
"Most people like things that are free. Obviously. I myself make good use of my library card."
Libraries are not free. They're paid for out of taxes, and my local council is very forceful in collecting them. Libraries tend to buy most of their books (and pay lending fees to the authors most of the time). Despite attempts to turn libraries into voluntary services, many public libraries still have paid staff.
"That sucks. But is besides the point. The key is consent. You didn't consent to that. The author of this book chose to make it freely available. Just like you are making your comments on hn freely available. its all about choice."
No, it's not just about consent but the affect on others. Let's say we have ten bands, and seven of them tell bars they're willing to play for nothing... That means the other three are unlikely to get paid work as a result. If people keep handing out free hot dogs, that means the hot dog seller down the road isn't going to sell any.
Why are people so disgusted at my proposal that people are paid for work? Even Marxist-orientated societies like the USSR and Cuba pay/paid people (including writers!) for their work.
It is easy to do unpaid work when you have money already and many don't. I'm beginning to think I'm talking to a bunch of rich kids here.
"Nobody "pocketed it". They keep a reserve for unexpected expenses or if fundraising goes poorly. There are plenty of things you can fault the Wikimedia Foundation for, but this seems like a stupid one. Obviously they are going to keep some money in the bank, just in case something unexpected happens."
I edited Wikipedia for fifteen years. Despite some deletions, there are still thousands upon thousands of my words up there, and dozens of articles which I started. I never got paid anything for it, in fact I constantly had to deal with obnoxious behaviour on there from administrators who kept enshittifying content and leaving me rude messages. That's what destroyed my good will. Only a handful of admin ever bothered to thank me for it (and yes I did have some medals/badges).
So Wikipedia and Wikimedia have plenty of my work, and other people's, and are making money off it, but most of the editors aren't. (Same with IMDB. Plenty of my work on there. Nothing to show for it, and they advertise on there.) Wikimedia is maybe not even the main profiteer off it, since AI is quite clearly raiding it for content and so are various businesses.
The universe, plot, and characters are all aggressively atheistic[1]. Meanwhile the prose is heavily infused with Christian religious language, references, and allusions.
Consequently, I'm not really sure who the book is for. I don't know any Christians who like atheistic hard scifi (although, I exist so there must be others). And I don't know many people into hard scifi who really care for the religious imagery.
Personally, I find the experience to be unique, so I think it's worth it if you can get into it.
Besides that (and to spoil the point of the book) the biggest flaw is that the author doesnt seem to trust the reader to get the point, which is that consciousness is an unnecessary (and detrimental) evolutionary dead end. Real intelligence is totally orthogonal.
As a software engineer who has seen very intelligent systems with no more consciousness than a paperclip for decades, I got on board with the premise as soon as it showed up. But then I kind of had to wade through case study after case study highlighting the idea.
[1] - this isnt atheism that's aggressive, but rather a universe where there's no doubt that there is no god with all of the consequences thereof.
> And I don't know many people into hard scifi who really care for the religious imagery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(Simmons_novel) is a massive classic and is full of that stuff. The Matrix has The One die and be resurrected as a godlike glowing being.
Most atheists/Christians aren't as rigid as you imagine.
> a universe where there's no doubt that there is no god
The vast majority of scifi (and other genres) doesn't care or take a position either way. Nothing in Blindsight says "there can't be a God"; it has nothing to do with that.
>Most atheists/Christians aren't as rigid as you imagine
True in a lot of cases but Simmons might not be the best example because he took such a bona fide ideological dive off a cliff later in life it even re-contextualizes the Hyperion books
> Nothing in Blindsight says "there can't be a God"
I feel this is missing the point that OP is trying to get at. I wish I could cite Blindsight more accurately, but it's been a long time since I read it.
I don't think OP is suggesting the characters in the book sit down and reminisce about the time scientists proved there's no god after all, ha ha weren't all those believers silly all those years.
But Blindsight I found to be deeply nihilistic about the place of "humans as we know them". Whereas religions affirm that humans as we know them are somehow cosmically special due to their relationship with God, Blindsight posits they're just a weird blip of biology destined to be outcompeted.
I wouldn't necessarily call it atheistic so much as ahumanistic. It seems to focus on survival, power and force, and feels like it denies, rather than affirms, any sense of our own worth.
I may be overstating the case; again it's been a long time since I read it. I remember having, as some other posters have a said, quite a depressed feeling after having finished it. I didn't hate the book, but I didn't feel like I'd learned anything that would improve my life. Other than having had the chance to grapple with challenging ideas- which is better than having read something with no intellectual stimulus!
Every book of fiction is aggressively atheistic, because every fiction is perceived by an believer as attack on his one and only fiction.
PS: And i write this a somebody, who is forced by the enlightenment to admit that your fiction is the only one producing a lawful high trust society and thus should be the governing basis for a working society.
> a universe where there's no doubt that there is no god
Do you mean that the universe itself provides clear, incontrovertible evidence there is no god? Or do you simply mean that in the universe portrayed, none of the people happen to have any doubt about the non-existence of god?
iirc i'd say it's the latter, as it's not scientifically possible to prove the absence of god. as far as i remember, the books don't introduce anything that might suggest new proof for the existence and the "aggressive absence of god" is just the continuation of the current trajectory where no further proof can be found for another 55 years.
It's the same reason why Evangelion uses a lot of Christian imagery.
Religion aside, the imagery is undeniably cool. It goes hard.
No other reason is required.
Side note: I wish we could retire Evangelion. Stop redoing the story with minor tweaks every few years. It's been 30 years. Please let Shinji rest.
> The universe, plot, and characters are all aggressively atheistic[1]. Meanwhile the prose is heavily infused with Christian religious language, references, and allusions.
I don't think there's any contradiction here. Atheists are often more interested in religious content than most religious people are, who just how with basics, vibes and traditions. Atheists (especially those that were raised in religious environments) are kind of morbidly fascinated with religious mythos.
For better or worse Christianity is the shorthand language of Western culture since so much of art philosophy and media draw from it. Plenty of non-religious (and even irreligious) works employ it for symbolism or metaphor, or like Hideaki Anno putting Christian symbolism all over Evangelion, just for the aesthetic.