Blindsight
Two months since the stars fell... Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months of silence while a world holds its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices that he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and a fainter hope that she'll do any good if she is needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called "vampire," recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths.
Stats for nerds
214recommend
385mentions
294people
2009–2026years
68% recommend30% neutral2% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I'm guessing whether you believe it possesses intelligence or not depends on your answer to Searle's Chinese room thought experiment[0]. I'd also recommend checking out the Peter Watts' book, Blindsight.
- Consciousness is also not necessarily relevant. Once machines start to influence the design of new machines in ways that are hard to examine in detail they can gain capabilities that are unexpected and unwanted.
Machines capable of this kind of influence and of concealing capabilities will naturally become more common simply through a combination of natural and artificial selection. No consciousness is required for such entities to become competitors.
For an examination of the idea of intelligence without consciousness see Peter Watts' Blindsight.
- I think Chiang is right about this, but there is a related philosophical mystery. The trend from Deep Blue to AlphaGo to LLMs solving Erdos problems suggests that Peter Watts was onto something when he wrote Blindsight. Reasoning ability is apparently independent of consciousness?
We haven't really come to grips with that yet. What does it mean if nothing we write proves anything about anyone's consciousness?
- You might like Blindsight by Peter Watts
- I am currently halfway through "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. It's a tough read but easily the most thought provoking take on consciousness and first contact i have encountered in years.
- The stuff by Peter Watts, Blindsight and so on, is fun.
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