Blindsight is a hard science fiction novel by Canadian writer Peter Watts, published by Tor Books in 2006. It won the Seiun Award for best translated novel and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. The story follows a crew of astronauts sent out as the third wave, following two series of probes, to investigate a trans-Neptunian Kuiper belt comet dubbed "Burns-Caulfield" that has been found to be transmitting an unidentified radio signal to an as-yet unknown destination elsewhere in the Solar System, followed by their subsequent first contact. The novel explores themes of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, and game theory as well as evolution and biology.
Blindsight is available online under a Creative Commons license. Its sequel (or "sidequel"), Echopraxia, came out in 2014.
The uncertainty of first contact, amid the uncertainty of human contact.
4 stars
Content warning
Mildly spoilery review, no details
I have only just encountered Watts's work. This book is a crashing tangle of ideas, drawing from evolutionary biology, to (most particularly) cognitive science and philosophy of mind of the late 1990s.
A ship, whose crew are all variously transhuman in diverse ways, are sent to communicate with first contact. The newcomers, however, are deeply mysterious, alien in the realest sense. The result a disorienting experience in which none of the available main characters are quite someone you can wholly empathise with, and we remain uncertain throughout of just what the encounter will involve for the crew or humanity generally.
My perception overall is this book, with its extensive references and sources section, is the kind of thing you might get if Michael Crichton wrote space opera (though perhaps more disciplined and sharper). It is jam packed with well executed ideas. Ultimately, I found it quite difficult to get through in parts simply because of just how utterly out of their depth everyone was, and how desperate and hopeless the contact mission would seem to be. I suspect this is indeed Watts's intent.
While it was nice to see the richness of the cognitive science being drawn on, my own theoretical commitments also mean that none of what is in play with regards to human cognition is really tenable though. That's a very niche complaint that most of the world won't have. A little more broadly is the easiness of the some of the evolutionary psychology though - some of which is I think a little problematic.
Overall, though, this is a very solid, well written space opera thriller, if a little grim.
This book has some interesting ideas, but I really struggled with following the storyline, but more, this felt like something from pre-1970s sci-fi, with all the white maleness that contained, and some of the 'slang', such as 'spaz' are just appalling. The book was published in 2006 and there is no excuse for including such offensive and abelist language. These things made it not a great read and I stopped half-way through.
1) "I do remember Helen telling me (and telling me) how difficult it was to adjust. Like you had a whole new personality, she said, and why not? There's a reason they call it radical hemispherectomy: half the brain thrown out with yesterday's krill, the remaining half press-ganged into double duty. Think of all the rewiring that one lonely hemisphere must have struggled with as it tried to take up the slack. It turned out okay, obviously. The brain's a very flexible piece of meat; it took some doing, but it adapted. I adapted. Still. Think of all that must have been squeezed out, deformed, reshaped by the time the renovations were through. You could argue that I'm a different person than the one who used to occupy this body."
2) "Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe …
1) "I do remember Helen telling me (and telling me) how difficult it was to adjust. Like you had a whole new personality, she said, and why not? There's a reason they call it radical hemispherectomy: half the brain thrown out with yesterday's krill, the remaining half press-ganged into double duty. Think of all the rewiring that one lonely hemisphere must have struggled with as it tried to take up the slack. It turned out okay, obviously. The brain's a very flexible piece of meat; it took some doing, but it adapted. I adapted. Still. Think of all that must have been squeezed out, deformed, reshaped by the time the renovations were through. You could argue that I'm a different person than the one who used to occupy this body."
2) "Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.
Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now?
Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials–but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean."
3) "This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams."
4) "'You think you'd be able to fight the strings? You think you'd even feel them? I could apply a transcranial magnet to your head right now and you'd raise your middle finger or wiggle your toes or kick Siri here in the sack and then swear on your sainted mother's grave that you only did it because you wanted to. You'd dance like a puppet and all the time swear you were doing it of your own free will, and that's just me, that's just some borderline OCD with a couple of magnets and an MRI helmet.' He waved at the vast unknowable void beyond the bulkhead. Shreds of mangled cigarette floated sideways in front of him. 'Do you want to guess what that can do? For all we know we've already given them Theseus' technical specs, warned them about the Icarus array, and then just decided of our own free will to forget it all.'
'We can cause those effects,' Sarasti said coolly. 'As you say. Strokes cause them. Tumors. Random accidents.'
'Random? Those were experiments, people! That was vivisection! They let you in so they could take you apart and see what made you tick and you never even knew it.'
'So what?' the vampire snapped invisibly. Something cold and hungry had edged into his voice. Human topologies shivered around the table, skittish.
'There's a blind spot in the center of your visual field,' Sarasti pointed out. 'You can't see it. You can't see the saccades in your visual timestream. Just two of the tricks you know about. Many others.'
Cunningham was nodding. 'That's my whole point. Rorschach could be—'
'Not talking about case studies. Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default. Rorschach does nothing to you that you don't already do to yourselves.'"
Probably the most mind-blowing book I've read this year. Difficult to untangle, but riveting and suspenseful. I hope Watts continues this thought experiment on intelligence and consciousness and new ways of thinking about thinking.
