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"And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can’t understand their analysis and you can’t verify their answers. You have to take the

"And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can’t understand their analysis and you can’t verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith—Or you use information theory to flatten it for you, to squash the tesseract into two dimensions and the Klein bottle into three, to simplify reality and pray to whatever Gods survived the millennium that your honorable twisting of the truth hasn’t ruptured any of its load-bearing pylons. You hire people like me; the crossbred progeny of profilers and proof assistants and information theorists… In formal settings you’d call me Synthesist." —Peter Watts, Blindsight (2006)

hoseja 4y ago
... and then the "hero" proceeds to not use this craft of his, at all.
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  As I read it, the entire book is him doing synthesis from the experts to us, the reader. He explicitly calls out that there's one character that he lets "speak for herself", implying that for everyone else, he's always translating, dumbing down for consumption. He actually says that their normal language would be unintelligible to us because it's an opaque multi-language pidgin that relies on realtime consensus access to be parsed.
  - hoseja 4y ago
    You are right, that is how it gets described at the beginning but, again, mostly inconsequential flair, no? Like adding Universal Translators and never having a Darmok and Jalad episode.
    - FeepingCreature 4y ago
      Yeah, that's a fair accusation. Part of the problem is of course that it's hard to have a novel where you only notice the primary conceit if you don't understand what the narrator is explaining. :-) Like, since perfect synthesis is undetectable; it just sounds like what you're hearing is straightforward common sense. You only notice the process when it fails. So for sure, the book could have played with that a lot more, especially since Siri's tools are meant to be broken towards the end, when he's implied to be penning this. I think there's bits where the book suggests that's what's going on ("I can't tell you what it means, only what it says"), but it never came across well to me. But then again, maybe that's just how a failure of synthesis would look. Like, you still want to understand what the book is saying, but if the mechanism is working it's invisible, and if it's not working, then you're still relying on it working to produce the thing you're reading. So it's just inherently hard to shine a light on the thing itself with itself, which of course plays into the central theme as well. Ie. because Siri is implied to not be fully conscious, it's hard for him to catch himself in the act of translating for us readers. (Of course we may say that a book designed to be hard to read is still hard to read.)

hoseja 4y ago

... and then the "hero" proceeds to not use this craft of his, at all.

FeepingCreature 4y ago
As I read it, the entire book is him doing synthesis from the experts to us, the reader. He explicitly calls out that there's one character that he lets "speak for herself", implying that for everyone else, he's always translating, dumbing down for consumption. He actually says that their normal language would be unintelligible to us because it's an opaque multi-language pidgin that relies on realtime consensus access to be parsed.
- hoseja 4y ago
  You are right, that is how it gets described at the beginning but, again, mostly inconsequential flair, no? Like adding Universal Translators and never having a Darmok and Jalad episode.
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    Yeah, that's a fair accusation. Part of the problem is of course that it's hard to have a novel where you only notice the primary conceit if you don't understand what the narrator is explaining. :-) Like, since perfect synthesis is undetectable; it just sounds like what you're hearing is straightforward common sense. You only notice the process when it fails. So for sure, the book could have played with that a lot more, especially since Siri's tools are meant to be broken towards the end, when he's implied to be penning this. I think there's bits where the book suggests that's what's going on ("I can't tell you what it means, only what it says"), but it never came across well to me. But then again, maybe that's just how a failure of synthesis would look. Like, you still want to understand what the book is saying, but if the mechanism is working it's invisible, and if it's not working, then you're still relying on it working to produce the thing you're reading. So it's just inherently hard to shine a light on the thing itself with itself, which of course plays into the central theme as well. Ie. because Siri is implied to not be fully conscious, it's hard for him to catch himself in the act of translating for us readers. (Of course we may say that a book designed to be hard to read is still hard to read.)