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.

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.

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.

Second book echopraxia is good too

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...

  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."

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.

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.

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

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 ;)

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.

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.

Len actually wrote a whole bunch books about humans meeting inscrutable aliens — Fiasco, The Invincible, Eden, His Master's Voice — but I think the best one is still Solaris. Many people know the film adaptations, but the novel is ultimately somewhat different in motivation and conclusion. It's a great read.

(One thing I just realized: For some reason Lem loves starting the book with a landing. All of these except His Master's Voice start with the main character(s) either landing a spaceship or docking with one.)

Rifters should definitely get more attention. A lot like Stand on Zanzibar, circa forty years later.

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?

> 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 fun is in non-trivial creative ideas linked to some hard science. Space intelligence, main character and grounded vampires all fit into this.

It could be not fun for you, but fun for many others.

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.

Isn't the point of the book that the aliens are not at all conscious?

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.)

---

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.

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.

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

That David Weber twist was absolutely terrible. Ruined the book for me.

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.

> The primary idea was “intelligence can take different shapes”…

IIRC, it was more "intelligence may be a maladaptive dead-end".

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.

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?

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".)

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.

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.

"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.

>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!

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.

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.

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.