Nataliya's Reviews > Blindsight

This book was absolutely nothing like I expected. Little did I know that for my hard SF adventure I needed to be comfortable not only with astronomy and physics and biology but also a hefty dose of philosophy and neuroscience and evolution — and a mind-boggling exploration not even into the nature of conscience but in its utility or complete lack thereof. There are enough abstract concepts for my mind not just to grapple with but to grudgingly admit defeat against.

What is it about? Well, on a surface it’s a First Contact story involving a crew of mentally and biologically augmented humans - or rather posthumans - on the “bleeding edge” of science, one resurrected apex predator (a scientifically plausible vampire with a Right Angle Glitch) and one advanced ship AI — all coming from the world of genetic engineering and virtual reality — tasked with exploration of an unknowable alien entity that takes them deep into the Oort Cloud.

“And so we waited: four optimized hybrids somewhere past the threshold of mere humanity, one extinct predator who'd opted to command us instead of eating us alive.”

And while they indeed find something very much alien in every imaginable way, this stops being your typical science fiction story and becomes a mind-breaking exploration of consciousness and hackable subjectivity of perception and torture and the inherent cruelty of game theory.

“Imagine a crown of thorns, twisted, dark and unreflective, grown too thickly tangled to ever rest on any human head. Put it in orbit around a failed star whose own reflected half-light does little more than throw its satellites into silhouette. Occasional bloody highlights glinted like dim embers from its twists and crannies; they only emphasized the darkness everywhere else.

Imagine an artefact that embodies the very notion of torture, something so wrenched and disfigured that even across uncounted lightyears and unimaginable differences in biology and outlook, you can't help but feel that somehow, the structure itself is in pain.

Now make it the size of a city.”

It’s very dense and technical and really requires your full focus, and rereading the passages a few times, and sometimes just staring at the wall while the cogs in the brain try to grind.

And it’s an unexpected ode to brainstem, that ancient reptilian brain that does all the work while the self-satisfied neocortex rests on its laurels, basking in the glory of that - possibly overrated - consciousness.

It’s beyond my comprehension, really, to imagine a superbly intelligent creature that yet does not possess that seeming pinnacle of creation, that self-satisfied self-awareness, that crown jewel that gives us humans the tremendous satisfaction and perception of being infinitely better than all those poor non-sentient creatures. After all, if we have it and we are successful, then it’s the ultimate goal and a prerequisite for success, for *being*. Even our smartest machines would hypothetically need to pass that Turing test for us to award them with true recognition — the “being-ness” itself.

“Point being you can use basic pattern-matching algorithms to participate in a conversation without having any idea what you're saying. Depending on how good your rules are, you can pass a Turing test.”

But what if all that is little but training wheels which are an impediment, really, if you forget to take the, off at some point? And is there any objective difference between feeling empathy and acting as though you feel empathy? And given how fragile it all is, what’s the point of putting it on the pedestal?

“What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?”

And then the ever-present dilemma of what to do when a new spacefaring intelligence is found. How do we go about friendliness or hostility? Do we assume the same competition approach, that damn zero sum game that served the winners throughout our history? At which point do you decide on the preventive strikes (that fragging euphemism for attack that nevertheless allows us to remain “the good guys”) and when do you justify torture itself?

“Killing innocents is the least of the risks you're running; you're gambling with the fate of worlds, provoking conflict with a star faring technology whose sole offense was to take your picture without permission.”

“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.”

“She'd just fallen back on the oldest trick in the Torturer's Handbook, the one that lets you go home to your family after work, and play with your children, and sleep at night: never humanize your victims.”

Oh, and it’s so pessimistic and bleak that you’ll end up blankly staring at a wall for a while after it all ends. That fragging elusive “human condition” that would not have been a problem had we allowed our reptilian brain to truly run the show.

Every theme addressed can sprout volumes upon volumes of frantic writing. But it’s that concept of consciousness as opposed to intelligence, and the survival / fitness value of those that made it hard for me. Electromagnetic radiation and its effects on the brain? Sure. Alien biology? No problem. Walking corpse syndrome? Alrighty. Spacefaring without consciousness, advanced math without self-awareness? Ummmm, huh???

“Because if Sarasti was right, scramblers were the norm: evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we—we were the flukes and the fossils. We were the flightless birds lauding our own mastery over some remote island while serpents and carnivores washed up on our shores.”

“There's no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative.”

It’s a difficult, dense book - but of the kind that makes you think long and hard about the validity of the concepts it discusses, the book that is not going for patting you on the back for putting in the effort but instead throws more challenges at you. It’s the book that demands concentration and focus and occasional looking up things to make sure you’re getting it right. It’s a challenge, and one that I found to be worth the time and investment. It’s not quite enjoyable in the way I’m used to, but rather uncomfortably fascinating and definitely not one for mass appeal. And I’m quite alright with that.

But damn, do I wish it was just a bit less bleak.

4 stars.

“I shook my head. "I just observe, that's all. I watch what people do, and then I imagine what would make them do that."
"Sounds like empathy to me."
"It's not. Empathy's not so much about imagining how the other guy feels. It's more about imagining how you'd feel in the same place, right?"
Pag frowned. "So?"
"So what if you don't know how you'd feel?”

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Buddy read with carol., Stephen, Phil and David.

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A link to a 5-minute short film that’s basically a trailer for this book (shamelessly stolen from carol’s review): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkR2h...

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My much less enthusiastic review of the sequel, Echopraxia: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...