Blindsight

About the book

Book author: Peter Watts

Peter is a Canadian author, and also a PhD in marine biology. He is now writing hard sci-fi because he got tired of his field being full with various interest groups. The book is about first contact with super advanced aliens. The book explores various themes of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, and game theory as well as evolution, biology and transhumanism. Due to this it is a rather complicated read. It’s really putting “hard” in “hard sci-fi” in my opinion.

Siri Keaton is a crew member of Theseus, sent to investigate a signal in the Oort cloud. This was prompted by Earth being probed by billions of lights during an event known as Firefall, announcing the presence of aliens in the solar system. The other hyper-specialist and cybernetically enhanced crew members are a linguistic woman with 3 other personalities in her head, a combat specialist, a biologist and a vampire. Then we also have The Captain, which is Theseus own artificial intelligence.

Reflection and takeaways

This contains spoilers

I liked that this book is somewhat dystopic. Any encounter like this has no real guarantee of a happy ending.

While I’m personally not so keen on transhumanism and cybernetic enhancements, they made some good arguments for it in the book. The enhanced were able to hyper-specialise and become really good at specific tasks. The non-uplifted just can’t compete and aren’t really useful anymore. The other alternative is to enter Heaven, the VR world where you can upload yourself. The others are called “Realists” and they are just stuck doing terrorism acts, like sabotaging VR-Heaven. Change is inevitable, and it even argued for that in the books.

Blindsight explores the idea of intelligence without consciousness in depth. It is theorized that these aliens are a very advanced hivemind – meaning extremely intelligent but not conscious. The biologists in the book point out that consciousness and the ego take a lot of upkeep, and that humans could technically be an oddity in the universe because we have it. Consciousness can’t compete with sufficiently advanced intelligence due to all that extra cognitive overhead. It takes a lot of energy to motivate you do to do tasks, which isn’t very darwinian. Also, the vampire argues that maybe consciousness and humans have stopped evolving, because at some civilization stage it becomes survival of the adequate instead of survival of the fittest. Consciousness can even be fooled, much like Rorschach is manipulating the crews perception and senses. And the question is – is consciousness necessary to do whatever life is doing? Anthills and beehives are very successful but the “hive” super-entity isn’t intelligent or conscious, and not ants either, however it’s intelligence is emergent.

The little communication they had with Rorschach, as the alien vessel called itself, was interesting. They determined that this intelligence lacked semantic understanding. What does that mean? They discovered that it was actually a ChatGPT/Chinese room agent that they were talking to. It didn’t know what it was saying, but communicated anyway – maybe to protect itself or buy time. The idea explored here is that dialogue / language can be deconstructed and computed as a function, which we know is possible now with LLM’s, but that certainly wasn’t a mainstream thought in 2006 when this book came out.

We also learned that almost everything that happened in the book was precalculated by this intelligence. It’s just not possible to compete when it is sufficiently advanced.

I’m thinking if we ever develop AGI and AI singularity happens, it could be familiar to this novel. Rorschach is a kind of intelligence is just so different. We don’t even know what it does or why, it just doesn’t follow the logic as biological humans do. It might not have urges or a sense of self-preservation, or want to grow or explore. Intelligences that are not conscious does not necessarily have similar drive or goals as us, and so they really are alien.

Why did I pick it

Remarked somewhere to be a really good sci-fi book.

Verdict

3.⁵⁄₅. It invoked many cool thoughts and things to think about, but reading it was hard at times. I guess my imagination didn’t keep up too well to picture all the events in my minds eye.