Name: Volodymyr Kondriianenko's review of Blindsight by Peter Watts
Item: Blindsight
Rating: 5
Author: Volodymyr Kondriianenko

Peter Watts

Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath.Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist-an informational topologist with half his mind gone-as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...

Blindsight

Volodymyr Kondriianenko

Two months since the stars fell... Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist--an informational topologist with half his mind gone--as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge. You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...

This book had a weirdly dated tone- like an edgy Chuck Palahniuk character who is too cool and traumatized to be empathetic or even think of a reason why humanity would want to save itself is tasked to be part of a group of not quite human misfits to meet aliens. The aliens are just brain cells. It’s a metaphor! But none of the characters are compelling because they all cut off the parts of their brain that makes them human. He ends up alone with no one to miss him and still like incapable of missing anyone anyway. I am Jacks autistic robot.

liz long

p-zombies are optimal in a nonzombie world

Air Abhipraya

Packed with intriguing ideas and commentary. Way too hard to read for my simple mind.

c0up

The Hugo Award-nominated novel by "a hard science fiction writer through and through and one of the very best alive." --The Globe and Mail Two months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since--until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who should we send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet? Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder and a biologist so spliced with machinery that he can't feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find--but you'd give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them. . . .

Tobias V. Langhoff

This book was one of several I picked up to read during my recent stay in Transylvania, because it features vampires, which in this book’s universe is a mostly extinct, but actual, ancient offshoot of the human race with great intellect and greater instincts. While in Romania, however, I contracted eye cataracts. Every morning for more than a week, I woke up blind, my eyelids glued shut by yellow goo. It halted my reading progress somewhat, but it also made me ponder the book’s eponymous unconscious ability every morning when I had to feel my way out of bed and into the bathroom to clean my face to restore my vision: Blindsight – the ability of people with certain forms of blindness to process visual input directly in the unconscious mind – is one of the novel’s arguments that having to route experiences through a cumbersome and slow sentient (or sapient) awareness is an evolutionary deficit.

My own sentient self is also encumbered with some irrational fears, not unlike the way the book’s hyper-rational and instinctual (and perhaps not entirely sentient) vampires experience grand mal seizures when their visual cortices see crosses due to an evolutionary glitch. One of my irrational fears, or phobias if you will, is head injuries. Nobody likes to injure their head, but every time I bump my skull (or my daughter’s skull) against something, I fret for days or weeks about the possibility of minor brain damage. Has my intelligence deteriorated an insignificant amount as a result? Am I the same person, or has the plasticity of my brain had to reroute some important neural pathways to circumvent the bruised brain, rewriting my identity in the process? If so, can I detect it, or is my previous state of mind lost irrevocably?

The main character in this book (who is male but named Siri; the book was published five years prior to Apple’s popularization of the name, but it’s always been a female name in my home country, so a bit jarring) has had half his brain removed and replaced with a computer. Whereas all humans have an instinct-based “lizard brain” with the sentient brain layered on top through evolutionary hot-patching, Siri has a three-part brain. As a result he is what could be described as mildly autistic. He has little empathy, and describes himself as having become a completely different person after the procedure. His job is to observe and process, never to interfere. When he has to interfere, both on the ship and with his former love interest, whom we see his interactions with in flashbacks, he is unsure what to do and has to create algorithms for himself to follow.

Siri is a member of the crew of the space ship Theseus (whose shuttle is named Charybdis; parallels to Greek mythology both) sent to investigate a possible first-contact scenario by rendezvousing with an alien Big Dumb Object or BDO, a science fiction trope that is deconstructed and investigated in this novel. What does it mean to be “dumb”? Is something dumb just because it’s not sentient and running on hyper-quick and complex instincts? Both Siri and the alien artifact are described as Chinese rooms; is a Chinese Room dumb just because it’s not sentient? Is an AI that can pass a Turing test dumb?

Other members of the crew have had other changes done to their brains, each related to the book’s themes of consciousness, awareness and free will. Susan James, the ship’s linguist tasked with communicating with any aliens, has had her mind divided into five different consciousnesses, a controllable and self-inflicted multiple personality disorder, a concept perhaps based in part on the old myth that we only use 10% of our brain – why not then stuff several people into one brain? This has some interesting consequences late in the story. There’s also Isaac Szpindel, who has augmented his body with robotics that his mind control as easily as his own body parts, like reversed phantom limbs. A soldier, Major Amanda Bates, is in charge of the ship’s robotic army, but it is implied that as a consciousness controlling automatons, she hinders what could have been a much more efficient army of programmed instincts, like a human brain inhibits its brain stem.

In addition there’s the vampire commander of the ship, Jukka Sarasti, and the mysterious AI Captain that actually runs the ship. Sarasti is the only crew member who communicates with the Captain, and he even has a physical interface that allows him to plug the Captain directly into his brain stem, presumably bypassing his sentience. Does he control the Captain, or does the Captain control him? Who’s in charge, and does it matter? Sarasti always speaks in the present tense. Is he aware of the passage of time?

The different forms of transhumanism (as well as the concept of “Heaven”, a computer simulation you can choose to have your consciousness uploaded into while leaving your body behind) reminded me of Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space series.

The reason for the mission is ostensibly to establish contact with aliens who years prior seemed to observe the Earth, and communicate with them if possible. Communication turns out to be both easy, as the aliens speak English, and hard, as the aliens are perhaps not sentient at all. At any rate the aliens are a good genre example of truly alien beings. Their capabilities and “personalities”, if they have any, are very much inscrutable. Do they have free will? Do humans have free will?

This is a good book, but at times hard to understand. I often found myself having to view past events in a new light after revelations about the crew’s and aliens’ psyche. Advanced theories of psychology are referred to constantly. I think Thinking, Fast and Slow would be a good book to read next (as well as the sequel Echopraxia), although this book contains an appendix explaining some current research on the fields.

(Blindsight can be read for free here: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsigh...)

Jay Harris

I’m glad I made it past the goofy “space vampires” premise and frustrating writing style, because this book actually explores some of the most interesting ideas about sentience I’ve read in a novel.

Joana Francener

Absolutely fantastic sci-fi book. Can only recommend it further.

Hernando

This book deserves all the good reviews. The way it deals with the consciousness is splendid.

Gavin

There is a horror in neuroscience. It isn't inherent: it depends on subverting your sentimental sense of self, meaning, will, introspection, spirituality; if you don't have these, it won't register. The horror takes unthreatening academic names like "agnosia", "readiness potential", "interhemispheric intrusion", "neurotheology", "reconstructive memory", "Chinese room". (Also "executive psychopath" though.) 
 
The Blindsight ethos - Gothic, fatalist, Darwinist, one of the grandest pessimisms I've ever seen - is what you get when you take a traditional worldview (dualism, free will, work as what dignifies life, human exceptionalism, further-fact identity) and slam the great disenchanting science of a hundred years into it. And then add the coming century's automation and self-modification.

 Blindsight put me in a funk for a week - even though I don't hold any of the positions it sinks. I suppose this is evidence of Watt's talent. ("Art is a nonrational tool for persuasion: beware.") Not the least of its achievements is maintaining its murky nihilism in a world where friendly superintelligences exist.

 Because of its actual knowledge, this is weird realism, well beyond Lovecraft's. They're coming out of the walls: they're coming out of our best science. The vampires (and, to an extent, the Jovian von Neumann spikefest the plot is about) detract from this deeper horror a bit. Doom; unfixable aberration; people who have warped themselves. If you find Black Mirror a bit too disturbing you might want to give this a miss. Watts even tackles "illusionism" - uniquely I think!

 Is it strange that the giant lessons of the cognitive revolution are still rare in fiction? The only explanations I can think of are: simply "the Two Cultures" (i.e. novelists are ignorant); or, more discreditable, that novelists are shilling for traditional philosophy, maybe because it sells. (#1 giant lesson: we do not have introspective access to most of what our brains or minds do, on the level of information processing, action, motivation, or even emotion. You might say Freud found this out - but he didn't use reliable methods, made huge obvious errors, and created a closed unfalsifiable loop and so did not really have knowledge.)

 In contrast, Watts knows a great deal, uses it well, and takes seriously what he knows: for instance, readiness potentials are given all the emotional weight they deserve. This novel has 100 scientific papers listed in the back. The only people who cram quite as many ideas into their books as Watts are Stephenson and Banks.

His scorn for the fumbling entendres of psychoanalysis is also extremely endearing:

  According to the experts of that time, multiple personalities arose spontaneously from unimaginable cauldrons of abuse — fragmentary personae offered up to suffer rapes and beatings while the child behind took to some unknowable sanctuary in the folds of the brain. It was both survival strategy and ritual self-sacrifice: powerless souls hacking themselves to pieces, offering up quivering chunks of self in the desperate hope that the vengeful gods called Mom or Dad might not be insatiable.

None of it had been real, as it turned out. Or at least, none of it had been confirmed. The experts of the day had been little more than witch doctors dancing through improvised rituals: meandering free-form interviews full of leading questions and nonverbal cues, scavenger hunts through regurgitated childhoods. Sometimes a shot of lithium or haloperidol when the beads and rattles didn't work. The technology to map minds was barely off the ground; the technology to edit them was years away. So the therapists and psychiatrists poked at their victims and invented names for things they didn't understand, and argued over the shrines of Freud and Klein and the old Astrologers. Doing their very best to sound like practitioners of Science. 



  "So we're fishing for what, exactly? Repressed memories?" 
"No such thing." She grinned in toothy reassurance. "There are only memories we choose to ignore, or kinda think around, if you know what I mean." 

People diss the prose but I think it fits the ethos incredibly well:

  We fled like frightened children with brave faces. We left a base camp behind: Jack, still miraculously functional in its vestibule; a tunnel into the haunted mansion; forlorn magnetometers left to die in the faint hope they might not. Crude pyronometers and thermographs, antique radiation-proof devices that measured the world through the flex and stretch of metal tabs and etched their findings on rolls of plastic. Glow-globes and diving bells and guide ropes strung one to another... 

Inside each of us, infinitesimal lacerations were turning our cells to mush. Plasma membranes sprang countless leaks. Overwhelmed repair enzymes clung desperately to shredded genes and barely delayed the inevitable. Anxious to avoid the rush, patches of my intestinal lining began flaking away before the rest of the body had a chance to die. 

 Siri, the sociopath pinhead, is a great character. But also often an infuriating Hollywood Rationalist, and several times he gets the last word which forces me to suspect Watts of it. Though the bit where his girlfriend is dying and he refuses to say anything because it would be cliched is clearly intentionally infuriating for the reader. So might be this stupid bit of game theory:

  "Well, according to game theory, you should never tell anyone when your birthday is."
"I don't follow." 
"It's a lose-lose proposition. There's no winning strategy." 
"What do you mean, strategy? It's a birthday." 

Look, I'd said, say you tell everyone when it is and nothing happens. It's kind of a slap in the face.
Or suppose they throw you a party, Chelsea had replied. 
Then you don't know whether they're doing it sincerely, or if your earlier interaction just guilted them into observing an occasion they'd rather have ignored. But if you don't tell anyone, and nobody commemorates the event, there's no reason to feel badly because after all, nobody knew. And if someone does buy you a drink then you know it's sincere because nobody would go to all the trouble of finding out when your birthday is — and then celebrating it — if they didn't honestly like you. 

...I could just... plot out the payoff matrix, Tell/Don't Tell along the columns, Celebrated/Not Celebrated along the rows, the unassailable black-and-white logic of cost and benefit in the squares themselves. The math was irrefutable: the one winning strategy was concealment. Only fools revealed their birthdays.

- this only follows if you have ridiculously strong error aversion, where the value of being certain about others' opinion of you overrules the pleasantness of ordinary interaction.

 He mentions (but then averts) the single most annoying error when talking about consciousness, which is that "maybe it's better for the p-zombie aliens to take over, since they are clearly fitter than us":

  "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." 

(Who cares about fitness? A world without qualia is 'Disneyland without children'.)

His Mathesonian attempt to naturalise vampires is kinda clever (they are a subspecies of cannibal savants), and the exemplar vamp Jukka is one of the best characters in the book - but overall their presence is distracting and off-piste; the right-angles epilepsy thing, the revived-by-corporate-greed schtick, more generally holding that corporate culture is putting macroscopic selection pressure to psychopathic nonsentience: all these things jolt me out of his otherwise well-built world.

 Besides the vampires, there are a few more over-the-top ughs. His whole theme of technology as inherently dehumanising, Black Mirror / Event Horizon is just as cherry-picked and annoying as it always is. The idea that consciousness is unadaptive, and so a one-off aberration in a universe of blind replicators - which steamrolls all objections in the novel - is not obviously true. But it is certainly true either way that our society is currently unadaptive, in the sense of not maximising reproduction. (And thank god for that.)

Wrenching but admirable. Great in spite of itself. For the nonangsty, post-dualist, post-further-fact version read Hanson and Simler instead.


[Free! here]

Shiveen Pandita

This was a good book. Some really dense ideas reminiscent of ted chiang style but deep focus on biology and sentience. I’m sure this is one of those books that I will come back to in 10 years and understand it better. I wanted to rate it 3 stars but decided to do 4 as the books tries to steer clear of commercial hard sci fi formulaic stories and actually pulls of something unique.

Liam Dyer

so dense with concepts it's disorienting. incredible and mind-bending. plus there's scientifically plausible vampires.

Nelson Zagalo

Um livro que se apresenta como HARD SF tem como protagonista um vampiro! E num mundo super-avançado, pleno de engenharia biológica, temos um dos protagonistas a quem foi retirado metade do cérebro para tratar a esquizofrenia?! No entanto, talvez o pior seja mesmo a escrita péssima e a total incapacidade de contar histórias. O mundo apresentado é uma total confusão, ninguém sabe onde está, nem quando, nem porquê, tal como os protagonistas, ninguém sabe de onde vem, nem quem é. A escrita vai saltando de cena para cena, continuamente, não por seguir qualquer abordagem estética, mas por incapacidade do autor em fazer mais do que isso.

Quanto aos diálogos, parecem tirados de um qualquer filme de Hollywood de segundo escalão, misturados com dados científicos, a fazer parecer mais do que aquilo que são. Não existe identidade, não existe personalidade, uma visão do mundo, um olhar de alguém sobre nada. Apenas um amontoado de descrições, por vezes interessantes, mas na maior parte das vezes confusas, e sem relação, ou com relações desenhadas para um fim.

Os conceitos centrais são interessantes, apesar de nada apresentarem de novo. “Point being you can use basic pattern-matching algorithms to participate in a conversation without having any idea what you're saying. Depending on how good your rules are, you can pass a Turing test.” Searle criou a Caixa Chinesa há 40 anos, e as Ciências da Comunicação diferenciam-se das Ciências da Informação por isso. Já a questão da trans-consciência apesar de interessante, acaba por não passar de um artifício.

Nada disto teria muito interesse não viesse o livro tão recomendado e com uma nota aqui no GoodReads tão elevada.

Kelsey Lynn

I picked this book up because the Reddit for SciFi books recommended it so many times on posts for horror sci-fi, my favorite genre, but admittedly often poorly executed. 

 Peter Watts really created something unique and clever here. Not only is it well written while remaining readable, but he really brought some amazing concepts to fruition. This book filled me with a constant building dread. I loved the main character, unlikeable and flawed in comparison to the average man. I honestly felt very seen by him. Do with that what you will. As someone who struggles with social situations and people, but has managed to perfect the formulas to be an arguably well-liked person. It was the first time I felt I saw my experience on paper. The world Watts creates is thought out and well executed, just enough to get the gist without bogging us down with excessive exposition. You can tell he likes his idea and researched it well. I found myself, admittedly, looking up many medical disorders and terms he mentioned. But at the same time, I appreciate the explanation through characters or events as opposed to authors that give us pages of explanation (cough Crichton, I love you, but). 

 The very concept he presents in this is believable and unique. 
It centers around a mission being sent to investigate a signal in space, only for them to find a ship that is nothing like what they've seen. First contact. The first contact that can seemingly communicate, but the idea of what communicating "is" becomes a factor in this book. I would say that I'm not 100% sold on space vampires, but I enjoyed that character, I will argue that he felt the most underdeveloped and was involved with the only eyebrow-raising questionable moments of the book. But the other characters while "out there" (a person with multiple personalities, a cyborg, etc) were believable, well written, and well-integrated into his future. The vampire idea was even well integrated, even if it was to poorest execution, but I'm just nitpicking there. 

 The birthday problem, the Chinese room, the aliens themselves, showed such intelligence and I found myself constantly running to my partner to read whole passages. This is something I don't do often, but he claims is how he knows I really like a book. 

Thank you Reddit for this reccomendation. While it still hasn't usurped "Ship of Fools" as the best SciFi Horror I've read, it has gotten the closest, and is one I will continue to think about and reread in the future.

Aleksandr

Первая книга, где заметки и примечания в конце не менее интересны, чем сама книга. Книга полна интересных рассуждений о самосознании, эволюции, теории игр и космосе. Временами голова пухла от такого количества подробностей.

Любимая часть – диалоги с Челси.

Необычно, что инопланетяне тут совершенно другая раса, ничем не похожая на людей.

"Только дураки рассказывают про свой день рождения."

Kyle S

I've read plenty of pop psychology books including Thinking: Fast & Slow, but this book seriously changed the way I thought I thought. Watts uses Blindsight as a thought experiment on different ways people and creatures think, perceive the world, and make decisions. By the time you finish this book you'll be questioning your own internal thought process.

John Whitney

Blindsight made me appreciate my unconscious mind.

Ben Nathan

Amazing on the idea front, but not sure how much I actually enjoyed it. I was definitely interested but not a big fan of the main character and felt uncomfortable in the way things were presented pretty often. Good, yes. For me, no.

Adam

After hearing this one recommended everyday on Reddit, being a fan of first contact stories and seeing it on the Hugo nominees for it's year, I decided to give it a shot. It's what a lot of people consider "hard sci-fi", but I'm slowly realizing is really just "hard to read" sci-fi. The story is very slow moving, with very little happening, and most of the exploration taking place in the descriptions of events, the types of beings and awareness.

There were a number of interesting ideas presented as well as some interesting characters, but in the end I wasn't able to connect with the story.

Volodymyr Kondriianenko &
Blindsight by Peter Watts

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