Science Reads: Blindsight – Tony Li

Science Reads

What is Consciousness Good For, Anyway?

tony li once wrote a two-part article for the Mathematics Union that included the phrase “Tony Li, you monster”

Blindsight cover by Tor.com with cover art by Thomas Pringle

Year 2082: first contact.

Thousands of alien drones appear in the sky, burning through the atmosphere in a spectacular fire show. In response, humanity quickly constructs an advanced spaceship, Theseus, and sends it off to investigate the source of the alien signals on the outer rim of the Solar System. When the crew lands on the alien base Rorschach, they capture two of its inhabitant alien ‘scramblers’ and waste no time in trying to extract information with the oldest and most powerful item in humanity’s tool box — “keep hurting them until you can distinguish speech from screams.” This is the premise of the 2006 novel Blindsight by marine biologist Peter Watts. True to the ‘hard sci-fi’ genre, which emphasises the accuracy and logical coherence of scientific speculations, Blindsight comes with pages of notes and more than a hundred references to various scientific publications discussing topics related to Watts’ speculations — “to try and convince you all I’m not crazy,” as he puts it. In and around the plot, Watts offers us plenty of speculative world-building, and we catch glimpses of a prosperous but fragile human society on Earth.

In the world of Blindsight, the proliferation of cybernetic and biological augmentations has meant that humans can become much stronger and more intelligent, if they so choose. However, many individuals still remain in the ‘baseline’ state, becoming increasingly unable to comprehend, communicate, and compete with the augmented superhumans.

Many also voluntarily enter a reality simulation aptly named ‘Heaven’, a personalised paradise of their hearts’ desires, brain-in-a-jar style. ‘Heaven’ costs you almost nothing, but utilises the unconscious brain processes of its clients for profitable ventures.

But even the most advanced augmentations fall short of the physical and intellectual prowess of the ‘vampires’ — an ancient predator and relative of Homo sapiens, only remembered in mythologies after their extinction at the dawn of human civilisation (an event owing to sheer bad luck; a fluke in evolution) and brought back through “the voodoo of paleogenetics.” Being dangerous predators, they are often locked in special cages by their ‘employers’ in conditions akin to slavery.

The focal point of Blindsight, “the heart of the whole damn exercise” as Watts puts it, is his philosophical thesis on the mind: what if ‘philosophical zombies’ — hypothetical beings that behave identically to thinking, intelligent humans but lack any inner conscious experience — exist in our universe?

Such speculation begins with the title of the book, which refers to the name of a real medical condition where a patient suffers from blindness not due to eye damage, but due to brain damage that prevents visual information from reaching their conscious mind. As a result, their conscious mind cannot ‘see’ anything, however they still subconsciously respond to visual stimuli, such as by avoiding obstacles, without ever consciously knowing that those obstacles existed. This phenomenon poses a curious philosophical case; as it turns out, sensory information doesn’t need to enter the conscious mind to affect our behaviour.

While it sounds strange at first, perhaps it’s much easier to accept the possibility that consciousness is not necessary for intelligence — especially in the age where A.I. has become the latest science buzzword. After all, it is still ridiculous to suggest that a machine-learning algorithm is conscious in the same way as a human, no matter how good it is at pattern-matching.

We see many similar phenomena in humans — like how some sleepwalkers can perform complex tasks without any recollection after waking up, or how certain actions can become part of our ‘muscle memory’ to the point where even consciously thinking about them would only hamper our performance.

While many scientists and philosophers over the ages have strived to learn more about the nature of consciousness, Watts’ interest is more pragmatic — what is consciousness good for, anyway? Citing a number of studies that show evidence of the possible costs and drawbacks of conscious thought and decision making, Watts explores this thought experiment in Blindsight: imagine a world where all the fairly reasonable premises outlined in those studies are correct…

And so, being less sentient, the vampires in Blindsight think rounds ahead of baseline humans, exploring far deeper into the logical trees of complex situations, when we can only take leaps of faith. They are also immune to all the bad decisions associated with hedonism; pleasure and pain are strictly limited to their evolutionary role as signals that inform about resources or danger. Hence, they also don’t enter ‘Heaven’ — there’s no point in it for them.

Even so, the vampires still possess rudiments of self-awareness, and it is the arrival of ‘scramblers’ that comes as a revelation at last — they are completely devoid of selfawareness; all their intelligence and decisions are unconscious ‘blindsight’. Without the burden of self-reflection and conscious feelings, their intelligence carries them across the stars, all while humanity seems to have given up and retreated into a coffin. It’s humans, with their constant contemplation and navel-gazing, who have become the minority that strayed from the true path; an aberration unworthy of true intelligence.

By the end of the novel, Watts has confronted us with a jarring dilemma: the self-aware and conscious intelligence of humanity is a fluke of evolution that’ll eventually doom us to the same fate as the dodos, and the only way to survive is to engineer the human brain to such a point that we become completely unconscious beings, philosophical zombies with intelligent behaviour but no conscious self. What is the preferable choice here? Either impending doom and certain death, or persisting as non-existent minds perpetually sleepwalking in the oblivion until the end of the cold and uncaring universe…

If you are interested in reading more, Watts publishes his works under Creative Common; Blindsight is freely available on his website https://rifters.com/