Think Galactic- Blindsight

For July's Think Galactic discussion, we talked about "Blindsight" (2006) by Peter Watts.

This book is awesome (says I) and this discussion was awesome (so say we all). So much so, in fact, that it's been a psychic block clogging up my Positron posting schedule, because I despair of trying to flesh out everything my notes record us saying without it turning into a book-length meditation. SO, without further ado, mostly unvarnished notes:

• "This book made me very happy. AND IT'S TRUE!" No such thing as free will, or the self, in any objective sense.
• "Oh and humanity dies, which is also a plus."
• Some of us had the opposite reaction! Didn't enjoy writing style nor the ideas.
• Criticism of the evolutionary psychology usage here, and particularly the conclusions about combativeness and aggressiveness.
• We liked the appendix on vampires!
• Some disliked trope of "protagonist who doesn't know how to feel."
• Lots of great ideas, but characters not very likable.
• I think this book is kind of hilarious, the way it embraces these kind of negative implications of modern science--the "Oogenesis" bedtime story, the birthday payoff grid...
• A really joyous embrace of jargon, sort of cyberpunky. It relies on you kind of knowing the overlapping references he's making.
• I personally don't buy his overall argument about consciousness being a drag, in ways I try to elaborate.
• This is one of my Favorite Books, and What That Maybe Says About Me.
• Extent to which this works as horror--a fair extent! And nice mixing of body/monster horror with intellectual/existential.
   
  
• "Nasty brutish & short" version of Rendezvous with Rama.
• In-text issue of jargon, characters "subtitling" to understand each other, and saying: "hey, I'm doing that!"
• Reading in the age of google
• "The jargon did kind of get on my nerves, because I like to understand a sentence when I read it."
• The character set-up bits work where we get them, like for Amanda Bates. "Imagine you're..."
• Michelle & Szpindel's relationship sweet and sad and weird and very cool.
• Let's talk about the last third of it, because it is hard to comprehend!
• "After reading this book I'm beginning to suspect my wife's Systems..."
• So pessimistic but with a kind of optimism at its core.
• Awkward audiobook, we are told. Make sense.
• Admiring Watts' lack of infodumping (but then there's some heavy plot element explanations at the end)
• There is a sequel: Echopraxia. I give it a so-so.
• There's too much: spaceships, vampires, intelligent computers, uploads, first contact
• But: it's unified by that central question of sentience, does intelligence require sentience.
• Mediated by this character who is by definition unsympathetic, a kind of human black box recorder
• Chinese room!
• Siri as Synthesist, translator, lobotomized narrator who's faking it
• Fascinating and involving to read, but also a little bit of a drag
• Shields itself from allowing itself to make emotional connections
• But contra: Siri does have emotion.
• Siri compared to Breq/Justice of Torren from "Ancillary": wide emotional range but doesn't allow the narrator to verbalize that
• There's too much but that's what I like about it.
• A really solid space vampire people would be enough for most people; Watts crams in like 50 other ideas.
• But it's not just about that vampire, or blindsight, they're all different axes of this theses.
• Vampires a reason to talk about transients and predators (orca types),
• Thinking about this qua SF, we used to think SF was about technology, about change--because this is too much, that's very much the way the world feels right now.
• Like a Wired article with all the ads popping up in your face and you're trying to click'em off so you can read the thing you want to.

• Compared to film "Primer"--talking about things without explaining them, it's scientists talking to other scientists, no infodumps for audience's sake
• Autistic (?) main character, other crew, vampires, ship AI, Rorschach entity--crammed full of uncomprehendible intelligences.
• Crew's already post-human, already a kind of alien.
• All of them, you can't imagine how they're thinking (Nagelbat dun dun dun!)
• "Continuum of ineffable"
• Genre of SF's stories or subjects that try to grapple with the concept of the extraterrestrial that is unimaginable, that isn't human. It's an attempt to do that.
• Comp to Star Trek (TOS), couldn't be more different--all those aliens have to be punchable or kissable
• We talked for a bit about the significance of names here- Rorschach, Theseus, Siri threw us off (Apple's Siri came out a bit after book).
• Theseus with Minotaur, Ship of Theseus paradox
• Siri considering himself self-identical over time (or not)
• Much darkly gleeful laughter over the reveal that Theseus and Sarasti might not have been separate the whole time. "SZNG. CLDNT CNTRL" LOL

My god, it's full of stars nihilist murder-starfish

• Comp to "2001"
• Watts personality coming through, abstract idea of human, baseline humanity, that wasn't explored very much, frustrating use of ev. psych theories
• Everyone doesn't react to things the same way
• What science tells us about how we really work is kind of pessimistic and grim compared to the idea that we have free will or souls.  The stories we tell about how we live our lives and interact with other people haven't, on a broad level, be updated by modern neuroscience etc.
• Difficulty of even defining free will usefully, what would really change if we all agreed we don't have it?
• Presentation of these ideas as a thought experiment
• Ev. Psych as a "just so story"
• The word "Human" is always capitalized. Hm.
• Baroque science book, early scientific skepticism towards instrumentation--connecting that to how the posthuman crew of Theseus seems to us
• Long discussion of the plot of roughly the last third, where things get a bit chaotic. We liked the way that Siri's consciousness and humanity have to be raised in the process of him explaining why that's a bad idea.
• Much debate over the idea of sentient communications as attack on the nonsentient Rorschach entity. And we connected their decision to wipe out humans to the Krikkit Wars in Hitchhiker's--a civilization looking out at the rest of the galaxy for the first time and saying "It'll have to go." Much laughter.

• Comparison to Lem's "Fiasco", about humans winding up wiping out an alien species because of fundamental misunderstanding. Very similar setup to "Blindsight" in some ways.
• We talked for a bit about the Chinese Room, Philosophical Zombies, how I think they're bunk.
• Rorschach & the Eliza Program
• Post-human but weirdly fixed gender
• Siri's mom as kind of a straw-woman, we try to wrap our heads around Heaven and why she won't be happy unless everything else goes, which brings us back to the Krikkit Wars!
• Talked about the sadistic pleasure of reading this book in terms of how it's poking us with all the evolutionary, neuroscience etc. that we kind of know but haven't integrated into our lives.
• "CEOs as less sentient argument" is pretty good. And disturbing.
• Island Biogeography Horror Space Opera--"Maybe we're the Dodos".
• Long talk on neurology and psychology here--lots of examples of interesting conditions, and
• The disastrous post-scarcity of "Blindsight", vs. hopeful post-scarcities like "2312". Mentioned the Freakonomics podcast.
• Plug for Sacks' books.
• "Is Peter Watts a pessimist?" Can one be a realist about the state of the world without being a pessimist?
• Talked a bit about the 3 schools of alien approaches--Pessimists, Optimists, Historians.
• Go check out the Drake equation!
• Long talk about the adage "technology implies belligerence", whether that's true, whether Rorschach is biological or mechanical, if there's even a divide there.
• I spin out a really dorky definition of technology versus biology, involving virtual design spaces.
• We also discuss "necessity is the mother of invention" as opposed to "invention is the mother of necessity"; argument being (contra Watts, or at least contra his "Historians"), that technological progress has at least as much to do with leisure time, social interactions, desire to impress others, ability to obsess over non-vital things, as it does with some kind of brutal Darwinian R&D in tooth and claw kinda thing.