Blindsight (Watts novel)

For other uses, see Blindsight (disambiguation).

Blindsight

Author	Peter Watts
Cover artist	Thomas Pringle
Country	Canada
Language	English
Genre	Science fiction novel
Publisher	Tor Books
Publication date	3 October 2006
Media type	Print (hardback)
Pages	384 pp
ISBN	978-0-7653-1218-1
OCLC	64289149
Dewey Decimal	813/.622
LC Class	PR9199.3.W386 B58 2006
Followed by	Echopraxia

Blindsight is a hard science fiction novel by Canadian writer Peter Watts, published by Tor Books in 2006. It garnered nominations for a Hugo Award for Best Novel, a John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and a Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. The novel 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 questions of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, game theory as well as evolution and biology. Blindsight is available online under a Creative Commons license. Its sequel Echopraxia came out in 2014.

Plot

In the year 2082, thousands of large, coordinated objects of an unknown origin, dubbed "Fireflies", burn up in the Earth's atmosphere in a precise grid, while momentarily broadcasting across an immense portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, catching humanity off-guard and alerting it to an undeniable extraterrestrial presence. It is suspected that the entire planet had been surveyed in one effective sweep.

Despite the magnitude of Firefall, many years pass with absolutely no new developments and, despite an initial international panic, things quickly return to normal. Eventually, quite by accident, a comet-surveying satellite comes across a radio transmission originating from a comet (subsequently named 'Burns-Caulfield'). This tight-beam broadcast is directed to an unknown location and in fact does not intersect the Earth at any point. As this is the first opportunity to finally learn more about the events surrounding Firefall, three waves of ships are sent out: the first being light probes shot out for an as-soon-as-possible flyby of the comet, then a wave of heavier (but much better equipped) probes, and the third being the ship Theseus, captained by an artificial intelligence, a vampire (an extinct apex predator offshoot of humanity that became extinct sometime during the Pleistocene but brought back through gene therapy on high-functioning sociopaths and autistic patients) as mission commander, as well as five cutting-edge transhuman crew members, each filling their own hyper-specialized niche for whatever might arise if first contact occurs by the time they arrive, many years after the first two waves. While the crew is in hibernation and en-route, the just-arrived second wave of probes commence a compounded radar scan of the subsurface of Burns-Caulfield, but this immediately causes the object to self-destruct. Theseus is eventually re-routed mid-flight to the new-found destination of the signal: a previously undetected gas-giant deep in the Oort, dubbed 'Big Ben'. After the crew wakes from hibernation while Theseus closes on Big Ben, they detect a giant stealthed object, assumed to be a vessel of some kind. As soon as the stealth capabilities are discovered and worked around, it immediately establishes radio communication and, in a range of languages varying from English to Chinese, identifies itself as 'Rorschach'.

The crew determines that Rorschach must have learned Human languages by eavesdropping on comm-chatter since its arrival. It is deduced that it has been in-system for quite some time, arriving sometime after the Broadcast Age due to the nature of its speech and vocabulary. Though over the course of a few days many questions and answers are given by both parties, the ones offered by Rorschach seem strange and non-revealing. Eventually Susan James, the linguist, determines that 'Rorschach' doesn't really understand what either party is actually saying.

Rorschach is found to have hollow sections, some with atmosphere, but all extremely lethal: Some "killing you instantly" and others "only killing you in a matter of hours". Since probes and robots are found to be completely ineffective due to the extreme amounts of radiation and EM interference, and after finding ways to survive short trips inside the impossibly harsh environments, the crew is sent down to explore Rorschach with a series of increasingly invasive procedures. They soon discover the presence of highly evasive, fast-moving 9-legged organisms dubbed 'Scramblers', of which they kill one and successfully abduct two for study. It is determined that the 'Scramblers' are more akin to something like white blood cells in a human body than actual individuals and that, although they both seem orders of magnitude more intelligent than human beings, they seem to completely lack consciousness.

The narrator, Siri, and the crew explore questions of identity, consider the nature of intelligence and consciousness, their utility, the possibility of one without the other, the implications of these properties on each other, and humanity's prospect at potentially being an unusual offshoot of evolution when taking these new insights into account, that perhaps most life in the universe is replicating non-sentient intelligence, when wasting resources on ego, "navel-gazing" and consciousness is hugely wasteful.

Things escalate and Theseus eventually decides to sacrifice itself and its crew using its antimatter payload to eliminate Rorschach, with Siri being shot off inside an escape vessel in a decades-long fall back to Earth to relay the crucial information amassed back to humanity. As he falls back towards the inner Solar System, he hears radio broadcasts which suggest that the vampires have revolted and may be exterminating baseline humanity.

Characters

Crew of the Theseus

• Siri Keeton is the narrator and main protagonist. He is assigned to Theseus as a "Synthesist," as his role is to interpret the actions of the specialized crew and report these activities to Mission Control on Earth. He comes to realize that the other crew members resent him for his role, seeing him as nosy surveillance.
• Major Amanda Bates is a combat specialist, controlling an army of robotic "grunts."
• Isaac Szpindel is the ship's primary biologist and physician. He is in love with Michelle, one of the Gang's personalities.
• Jukka Sarasti is a vampire and the crew's nominal (and frightening) leader. As a vampire predator, he is alleged to be far smarter than baseline humans. The novel's conclusion questions to what extent Sarasti has actually led the crew, as the ship's artificial intelligence is implied to have been in command.
• The Gang are four distinct personalities in the mind of one woman, the ship's linguist. They are tasked with communicating with the aliens, if possible. A single personality "surfaces" to take control of their body at any given time. The active personality reveals itself through a change in tone and posture. These personalities express offence when referred to as "alters". The personalities are:
  • Susan James, who the others refer to as "Mom," is the "original" personality.
  • Michelle is a shy, quiet, synaesthetic woman who is romantically involved with Szpindel.
  • Sascha is harsher and more overtly hostile towards Siri.
  • Cruncher, a male, rarely surfaces and serves as an advanced data-processing facility for James.
• Robert Cunningham, Szpindel's backup, is a secondary biologist/physician.
• The Captain is the ship's artificial intelligence. Throughout the story, the Captain remains inscrutable and mysterious, generally communicating directly only with Sarasti.

People on Earth

• Robert Paglino, Siri's childhood best friend.
• Chelsea, Siri's ex-girlfriend.
• Helen Keeton, Siri's mother, whose consciousness has been connected, brain in a vat style, to a virtual utopia called "Heaven." As a parent, she traumatized Siri with emotional demands and intrusiveness into his private life.
• Jim Moore is Siri's father and a Colonel involved with planetary defense.

Major themes

Consciousness

The exploration of consciousness is the central thematic element of Blindsight. The title of the novel refers to the condition blindsight, in which vision is non-functional in the conscious brain but remains useful to non-conscious action. Other conditions, such as Cotard delusion and Anton–Babinski syndrome, are used to illustrate differences from the usual assumptions about conscious experience. The novel raises questions about the essential character of consciousness. Is the interior experience of consciousness necessary, or is externally observed behavior the sole determining characteristic of conscious experience? Is an interior emotional experience necessary for empathy, or is empathic behavior sufficient to possess empathy? Relevant to these questions is a plot element near the climax of the story, in which the vampire captain is revealed to have been controlled by the ship's artificial intelligence for the entirety of the novel.

Philosopher John Searle's Chinese room thought experiment is used as a metaphor to illustrate the tension between the notions of consciousness as an interior experience of understanding, as contrasted with consciousness as the emergent result of merely functional non-introspective components. Blindsight contributes to this debate by implying that some aspects of consciousness are empirically detectable. Specifically, the novel supposes that consciousness is necessary for both aesthetic appreciation and for effective communication. However, the possibility is raised that consciousness is, for humanity, an evolutionary dead end. That is, consciousness may have been naturally selected as a solution for the challenges of a specific place in space and time, but will become a limitation as conditions change or competing intelligences are encountered.

The alien creatures encountered by the crew of the Theseus themselves lack consciousness. The necessity of consciousness for effective communication is illustrated by a passage from the novel in which the linguist realizes that the alien creatures can't be, in fact, conscious because of their lack of semantic understanding:

"Tell me more about your cousins," Rorschach sent.
"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."
"Well, it asked for clarification," Bates pointed out.
"It asked a follow-up question. Different thing entirely."

The notion that these aliens could lack consciousness and possess intelligence is linked to the idea that some humans could also have diminished consciousness and remain outwardly functional. This idea is similar to the concept of philosophical zombie, as it is understood in philosophy of mind. Blindsight supposes that sociopaths might be a manifestation of this same phenomenon, and the demands of corporate environments might be environmental factors causing some part of humanity to evolve toward becoming philosophical zombies.

Transhumanism

Blindsight also explores the implications of a transhuman future. Within the novel, humans no longer engage in sex with other humans for pleasure, instead choosing to use virtual reality to find idealized and submissive partners, and many choose to withdraw from reality entirely by living in constructed virtual worlds, referred to as "Heaven". Vampires are predators from humanity's distant past, resurrected through recovered DNA, and live among the humans of the late 21st century. These vampires operate with diminished sentience presented as comparable to high-functional autism with comparable dysfunction in affect and speech, but have the advantage of multiple simultaneous thoughts occurring in parallel within their minds. Enhanced pattern-matching skills comparable to some forms of autism combine with this "hyperthreading" to make them invaluable in developing unusual and often very-effective approaches to solving complex problems.

Reception

Carl Hayes, in his review for Booklist, wrote: "Watts packs in enough tantalizing ideas for a score of novels while spinning new twists on every cutting-edge motif from virtual reality to extraterrestrial biology." Kirkus Reviews said about the book: "Watts carries several complications too many, but presents nonetheless a searching, disconcerting, challenging, sometimes piercing inquisition." Jackie Cassida in her review for Library Journal wrote: "Watts continues to challenge readers with his imaginative plots and superb storytelling." Publishers Weekly wrote: "Watts puts a terrifying and original spin on the familiar alien contact story."

Elizabeth Bear, an award-winning author in the science fiction field, declared:

"It's my opinion that Peter Watts's Blindsight is the best hard science fiction novel of the first decade of this millennium — and I say that as someone who remains unconvinced of all the ramifications of its central argument. Watts is one of the crown princes of science fiction's most difficult subgenre: his work is rigorous, unsentimental, and full of the sort of brilliant little moments of synthesis that make a nerd's brain light up like a pinball machine. But he's also a poet — a damned fine writer on a sentence level..."

See also

• Thomas Metzinger's Being No One
• Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

External links

• The full text of Blindsight at Watts' official website
• Audio review and discussion of Blindsight at The Science Fiction Book Review Podcast