This 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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".)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
IIRC, it was more "intelligence may be a maladaptive dead-end".
> might have some lingering trauma
Why does every character have to have some trauma? Just because the Oscar committee says so?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Religion aside, the imagery is undeniably cool. It goes hard.
No other reason is required.
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.
Despite that, still one of my all time favorite sci fi books. A fantastic exploration of intelligence, conscioussness and first contact.
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.
Are you also opposed to open source software?
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.