5 ms·

Blindsight by Peter Watts (full novel)

86 points by digging 3y ago

pointlessone 3y ago
I see a lot of glowing comments here. I tried it but couldn’t finish. It’s very confusing. It constantly mentions things, places and events that have not been properly introduced. Minor spoilers ahead. One of the major characters is a vampire. The character is introduced as if everyone knows what a vampire is. And it’s kinda true. Readers probably have some idea what it is. So do characters in the world. But about it turns out vampires in the world are quite different to what a common reader might know. And this gets first explained about third way in the book. Things get explained eventually but I just got tired being confused all the time. Do I need to remember this thing I’m told? Do I rely on my prior knowledge or do I get a different explanation later? Do I reread past parts when I get those explanations in case I took things wrong? I see why people are excited about all the ideas in the book but it’s an extremely hard read. I wonder whether people are attached to it mostly because they had to work hard to get through it.
- piaste 3y ago
  It's a different style of introducing a fantastical setting compared to the classic exposition dump, or the clumsy audience- substitute narrator who keeps asking for explanations, but it's far more engaging if you just let yourself enjoy the ride for a bit. For example, I believe that early on the narrator speaks about his mother 'going to Heaven' - you're supposed to be curious about what exactly that means, since it's clearly not the same way we use the phrase. You're supposed to look forward to the eventual explanation, and to trust that there will be one. Of course if that explanation never comes, and the detail is critical to the plot, that's a failure of the author. But no different from any other plot hole - that's what reviews are for.
  - thedrbrian 3y ago
    >For example, I believe that early on the narrator speaks about his mother 'going to Heaven' >Of course if that explanation never comes, and the detail is critical to the plot it's the matrix. Siri's mum ends up in a data centre somewhere with her conscious mind having every whim sated while her unconscious is running vampire Facebook or whatever
  - pointlessone 3y ago
    I believe the Heaven is explained. At least it's shown what it is and is kinda understandable. The whole book is written from the point of view of the main character in a form similar to a diary. Diegetically it makes sense to not explain everything because the character knows it all already. I kinda like the idea of it but in practice it left me confused most of the time. I fully admit that it might be just me. I like new ideas and non-linear story telling (e.g. I absolutely love Use of Weapons by Banks). I like when my books make me go "Fuck yeah!" (excited) or "Oh fuck!" (surprised). This one made me go "WTF?" (confused) more than I like.
    - MeImCounting 3y ago
      I loved the writing style for the same reason I loved the writing style in Use of Weapons. I absolutely hate exposition dumps. I can think so treat me like it. Maybe try listening to an audiobook of Blindsight I did that, I havent actually read it yet but the audiobook was very good.
- caconym_ 3y ago
  It's less about working hard and more about going with the flow. Where you found references to hitherto unexplained aspects of the book's universe confusing and frustrating, another reader (e.g. me) might find them intriguing and tantalizing. When I read Blindsight I was happy to accept that its universe was a strange one different from my own, and that I would learn more about it as I kept reading. This requires some degree of trust (or at least indulgence) in the author, but it's a fairly common expositional style in fiction.
- Aisen8010 3y ago
  The author explains the vampires in another document [0]. The vampires were my favorite part of the book. [0] https://rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf https://rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf
- maxglute 3y ago
  Book indeed a slog, audiobook enjoyable. Side-quel, Echopraxia even more sloggy, took multiple attempts to audiobook. Still enjoyable and worth the effort, one of my more favoured scifi works. But also one of those titles where you're also fine reading a synposis and entries on tvtropes. Would make a fun movie.
- water-data-dude 3y ago
  Blindsight was the first book I read by Peter Watts. The vampires threw me for a loop when I was reading it too. They seemed like a weird element to include in a moderately hard sci-fi book, and it was a bit jarring. The explanation for how they were a subspecies that got resurrected was kinda weak, and for the first chunk of the book I thought they were only there because the author really likes vampires or something. Later on it turns out that he had a good reason for including them! They’re included so he could compare and contrast human minds with other types of minds: the really alien (the Scramblers), and the human-ish (the vampires). The whole thing is a neat sci-fi story wrapped around a prolonged meditation on consciousness, which I think is neat (but I can also understand if it isn’t your bag).
- digging 3y ago
  It's a fairly difficult book to get through if it's not a style you're used to. I loved it on the first read, but on the second read I realized there was much of the book I had understood so poorly that my brain just forgot about it. At times, Watts gets really confusing - this is true in all of his books. However, I invariably find that it's worth it to just move on from those sections and continue reading. The slow introductions to weird ideas is definitely intentional; you're not intended to hold all the clues in your head and piece it together like a mystery.
justusthane 3y ago
I'm curious what folks here would use to save and read this on mobile? The question doesn't apply so much to this particular instance since there's an .epub version available, but I often come across long HTML or PDF articles or books that I mean to read but never do, because I don't have a good way to maintain them (and especially save my current place) for reading on mobile. Bonus points if it's self-hosted.
- plorg 3y ago
  I keep dreaming of good article->epub conversion, but the options out there aren't great. Most of the browser plugins run through "reading mode", and if that doesn't work (especially if the article is posted in a SPA) they're cooked. Calibre in theory can turn webpages into ebooks, but in practice it's a lot of work to make it nice, if it works at all, and there's no real way to use it on mobile.
- ericbarrett 3y ago
  I found the PDF much more readable than the epub. The fonts or something. Finished it on my iPad using the stock PDF viewer, it’s pretty good in iOS (except it forgets your page sometimes).
- digging 3y ago
  To be honest, I first read this entirely in a mobile browser tab in HTML format during breaks at work (until I got so hooked I began reading it on my phone while sitting on the porch for hours at a time). It was a bit of a pain, but I thought it was so cool that it was available for free that I dealt with the issues of having to scroll back to my place once in a while.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  I use this bookmarklet from DotePub: javascript:(function()%7Btry%7Bvar%20d=document,w=window;if(!d.body%7C%7Cd.body.innerHTML=='')throw(0);var%20s=d.createElement('link'),h=d.getElementsByTagName('head')%5B0%5D,i=d.createElement('div'),j=d.createElement('script');s.rel='stylesheet';s.href='//dotepub.com/s/dotEPUB-favlet.css';s.type='text/css';s.media='screen';h.appendChild(s);i.setAttribute('id','dotepub');i.innerHTML='%3Cdiv%20id=%22status%22%3E%3Cp%3EConversion%20in%20progress...%3C/p%3E%3C/div%3E';d.body.appendChild(i);j.type='text/javascript';j.charset='utf-8';j.src='//dotepub.com/j/dotepub.js?v=1.2&s=ask&t=mobi&g=en';h.appendChild(j);%7Dcatch(e)%7Bw.alert('The%20page%20has%20no%20content%20or%20it%20is%20not%20fully%20loaded.%20Please,%20wait%20till%20the%20page%20is%20loaded.');%7D%7D)();
more_corn 3y ago
This book contains my favorite take on the nature of consciousness.
BobaFloutist 3y ago
Wow, this looked incredibly shady, but apparently this is the author's official website. Good for him for releasing his book as Creative Commons, that's a cool move.
- literalAardvark 3y ago
  Cool but it's unfortunate that he was forced to do it for such a great book to live. It really is one of the best books of the last decades, in my humble opinion the best.
  - aslfjiasf 3y ago
    What do you mean by "forced to do it"?
    - unaindz 3y ago
      Watts has recently made Blindsight available online through a Creative Commons license, so you can check out the book before you buy. Or perhaps make that so you can read the book if you can't buy: What I find interesting about it is that he's calling the CC release "an act of desperation more than experimentation." Watts explains his thinking here (with additional thoughts here), but the short form is that according to Watts the book got a small first printing (3,700 copies), isn't being carried wasn't pre-ordered by the bricks and mortar stores of Borders and Barnes & Noble, is hard to find in the specialty book stores, and is on the bubble as toward whether there'll be a second printing of the book or not. By putting the book out in a CC online version, Watts suggests, at least people can find it and read it. I'm citing from here which also contain links to the actual Peter Watts reasoning: http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004689.html http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004689.html
      - slowmovintarget 3y ago
        That's a crying shame. It's an incredible book. I guess I got one of those 3,700 hardcovers. It's on my shelf next to the Echopraxia hardcover.
atombender 3y ago
Fantastic novel. Fans of science fiction should not miss it. Watts' other books, such as The Freeze-Frame Revolution, are also excellent. I also quite liked the "sidequel", Echopraxia.
- unaindz 3y ago
  Don't forget the short story The Colonel which could be considered a prequel to Echopraxia. http://www.tor.com/2014/07/29/the-colonel-peter-watts http://www.tor.com/2014/07/29/the-colonel-peter-watts The things unoffical sidequel to The Thing is also very good. http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ He publishes lots (all?) of his books for free using the Creative Commons licence. I pirate most of my shit tbh but after reading two of his trilogies and finding them some of the best books I have read I had to donate: https://rifters.com/real/donation.htm https://rifters.com/real/donation.htm PD: Minion in the donate page kinda looks like a Petter Watts vampire but im sure he was a bless to have around.
  - atombender 3y ago
    The Things is such a brilliant re-imagining of John Carpenter's The Thing. I remember reading it a long time ago before becoming familiar with his work, then re-discovering it after reading Blindsight, and of course it makes perfect sense for him to write this story. I have not read the Rifter series, is it as good as his other books?
    - lproven 3y ago
      TBH I gave up on book 1 of the Rifters. :-( Loved Blindsight, loved the Things, but DNF B-Max.
    - duskwuff 3y ago
      The Rifters trilogy (quadrilogy?) is kind of rough. They were his first published novels, and there's a kind of awkward gear-shift between the previously published material (much of the first novel was a fixup of "A Niche" and other short stories) to newly written content. There's some interesting stuff in there -- if you've previously read the Firefall novels you'll recognize some early versions of ideas and motifs which he develops more fully in the later series -- but ultimately I'd describe it as skippable.
Hortinstein 3y ago
This book is great...I am a big fan of the rifters trilogy also by Watts. They have some great fictional speculation on the Internet and how it's chaotic mix of automated agents tearing at each other that really reminds me of what could be possible with the content creation of LLMs. "In Peter Watts's Rifters Trilogy, which includes "Starfish", "Maelstrom", and "ßehemoth", the internet is a significant theme, especially in its altered, chaotic state. It is described as no longer trustworthy, having been overwhelmed by self-evolving viruses and the descendants of self-evolving anti-viruses that spiraled out of control. In this futuristic setting, the internet has been renamed "Maelstrom" to reflect its chaotic and unpredictable nature, becoming a space that is both electronic and ecological, complete with its own digital ecosystem" - synopsis I ironically used chat gpt to write
johngossman 3y ago
Just read this. Good story, crazily imaginative and original, and yet all the ideas are directly drawn from research. The book has (checks) 133 endnotes mostly from Science and Nature as well as academic texts. This could mean the story is forced, but it isn't.
- unaindz 3y ago
  The research is not only on this one, he does this for all his full-lenght books and he keeps the right balance between plausible, novel and interesting. Reading the author notes about the ideas and what research they are based off is an extra pleasure after finishing one of his books.
rationalthug 3y ago
On my personal list of the top ten science fiction novels of the last twenty years. Still re-read it every now and then.
KingMob 3y ago
I read this back when I was a neuroscientist studying consciousness, and it was a very intriguing premise. The title was super-relevant, since I was actually analyzing Patient GY’s data at the time! However, I think the key idea that consciousness is a local maximum in the universe is fundamentally mistaken, if a cool thought experiment. The brain is an expensive organ, and unless consciousness is truly pointless, it would be subject to evolutionary pressure like anything else. I doubt it could escape those pressures, even just within earth. The vampires were cool tho.
- sho 3y ago
  > I think the key idea that consciousness is a local maximum in the universe is fundamentally mistaken, if a cool thought experiment. Very much agree, on both counts. Even "just" on earth, it's not like the more mechanistic approaches didn't have plenty of chances to compete. The near-instant and very complete domination by the first species to reach a certain level - and its subsequent orders-of-magnitude raising as it then starts to compete mainly with itself - was totally driven by evolution and there's no reason to think it wouldn't happen anywhere else. The only variable I can really see is in where it (evolution-driven intelligence increase) stops. It's extremely hard to imagine even the basics such as group coordination and complex communication without some sense of self, and even the animals we see on earth with some level of these abilities demonstrate at least a proto-consciousness, which might well have won out in the end had we not been first past the post. There's no reason to think this phenomenon would be an earth-only anomaly. It reminds of the "million monkeys with a million keyboards" thought experiment. Yes, they will, given infinite time, produce the entire works of shakespeare. But in the real universe they don't have infinite time, the actual shakespeare evolved, wrote it all first, then took over the monkey planet and enslaved or at least repurposed them before they even got the first paragraph out. I don't mean to suggest that homo sapiens is some kind of universal peak of capability - we are almost certainly not - but I find it pretty much impossible to imagine sentient creatures being outcompeted by non-sentient ones under any circumstances. It's expensive, sure, but consciousness appears to be a - the - superweapon, and whoeever grasps it first, wins.
  - MeImCounting 3y ago

86 points by digging 3y ago

I see a lot of glowing comments here. I tried it but couldn’t finish. It’s very confusing. It constantly mentions things, places and events that have not been properly introduced. Minor spoilers ahead. One of the major characters is a vampire. The character is introduced as if everyone knows what a vampire is. And it’s kinda true. Readers probably have some idea what it is. So do characters in the world. But about it turns out vampires in the world are quite different to what a common reader might know. And this gets first explained about third way in the book. Things get explained eventually but I just got tired being confused all the time. Do I need to remember this thing I’m told? Do I rely on my prior knowledge or do I get a different explanation later? Do I reread past parts when I get those explanations in case I took things wrong? I see why people are excited about all the ideas in the book but it’s an extremely hard read. I wonder whether people are attached to it mostly because they had to work hard to get through it.

piaste 3y ago
It's a different style of introducing a fantastical setting compared to the classic exposition dump, or the clumsy audience- substitute narrator who keeps asking for explanations, but it's far more engaging if you just let yourself enjoy the ride for a bit. For example, I believe that early on the narrator speaks about his mother 'going to Heaven' - you're supposed to be curious about what exactly that means, since it's clearly not the same way we use the phrase. You're supposed to look forward to the eventual explanation, and to trust that there will be one. Of course if that explanation never comes, and the detail is critical to the plot, that's a failure of the author. But no different from any other plot hole - that's what reviews are for.
- thedrbrian 3y ago
  >For example, I believe that early on the narrator speaks about his mother 'going to Heaven' >Of course if that explanation never comes, and the detail is critical to the plot it's the matrix. Siri's mum ends up in a data centre somewhere with her conscious mind having every whim sated while her unconscious is running vampire Facebook or whatever
- pointlessone 3y ago
  I believe the Heaven is explained. At least it's shown what it is and is kinda understandable. The whole book is written from the point of view of the main character in a form similar to a diary. Diegetically it makes sense to not explain everything because the character knows it all already. I kinda like the idea of it but in practice it left me confused most of the time. I fully admit that it might be just me. I like new ideas and non-linear story telling (e.g. I absolutely love Use of Weapons by Banks). I like when my books make me go "Fuck yeah!" (excited) or "Oh fuck!" (surprised). This one made me go "WTF?" (confused) more than I like.
  - MeImCounting 3y ago
    I loved the writing style for the same reason I loved the writing style in Use of Weapons. I absolutely hate exposition dumps. I can think so treat me like it. Maybe try listening to an audiobook of Blindsight I did that, I havent actually read it yet but the audiobook was very good.
caconym_ 3y ago
It's less about working hard and more about going with the flow. Where you found references to hitherto unexplained aspects of the book's universe confusing and frustrating, another reader (e.g. me) might find them intriguing and tantalizing. When I read Blindsight I was happy to accept that its universe was a strange one different from my own, and that I would learn more about it as I kept reading. This requires some degree of trust (or at least indulgence) in the author, but it's a fairly common expositional style in fiction.
Aisen8010 3y ago
The author explains the vampires in another document [0]. The vampires were my favorite part of the book. [0] https://rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf https://rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf
maxglute 3y ago
Book indeed a slog, audiobook enjoyable. Side-quel, Echopraxia even more sloggy, took multiple attempts to audiobook. Still enjoyable and worth the effort, one of my more favoured scifi works. But also one of those titles where you're also fine reading a synposis and entries on tvtropes. Would make a fun movie.
water-data-dude 3y ago
Blindsight was the first book I read by Peter Watts. The vampires threw me for a loop when I was reading it too. They seemed like a weird element to include in a moderately hard sci-fi book, and it was a bit jarring. The explanation for how they were a subspecies that got resurrected was kinda weak, and for the first chunk of the book I thought they were only there because the author really likes vampires or something. Later on it turns out that he had a good reason for including them! They’re included so he could compare and contrast human minds with other types of minds: the really alien (the Scramblers), and the human-ish (the vampires). The whole thing is a neat sci-fi story wrapped around a prolonged meditation on consciousness, which I think is neat (but I can also understand if it isn’t your bag).
digging 3y ago
It's a fairly difficult book to get through if it's not a style you're used to. I loved it on the first read, but on the second read I realized there was much of the book I had understood so poorly that my brain just forgot about it. At times, Watts gets really confusing - this is true in all of his books. However, I invariably find that it's worth it to just move on from those sections and continue reading. The slow introductions to weird ideas is definitely intentional; you're not intended to hold all the clues in your head and piece it together like a mystery.

justusthane 3y ago

I'm curious what folks here would use to save and read this on mobile? The question doesn't apply so much to this particular instance since there's an .epub version available, but I often come across long HTML or PDF articles or books that I mean to read but never do, because I don't have a good way to maintain them (and especially save my current place) for reading on mobile. Bonus points if it's self-hosted.

plorg 3y ago
I keep dreaming of good article->epub conversion, but the options out there aren't great. Most of the browser plugins run through "reading mode", and if that doesn't work (especially if the article is posted in a SPA) they're cooked. Calibre in theory can turn webpages into ebooks, but in practice it's a lot of work to make it nice, if it works at all, and there's no real way to use it on mobile.
ericbarrett 3y ago
I found the PDF much more readable than the epub. The fonts or something. Finished it on my iPad using the stock PDF viewer, it’s pretty good in iOS (except it forgets your page sometimes).
digging 3y ago
To be honest, I first read this entirely in a mobile browser tab in HTML format during breaks at work (until I got so hooked I began reading it on my phone while sitting on the porch for hours at a time). It was a bit of a pain, but I thought it was so cool that it was available for free that I dealt with the issues of having to scroll back to my place once in a while.
carlosjobim 3y ago
I use this bookmarklet from DotePub: javascript:(function()%7Btry%7Bvar%20d=document,w=window;if(!d.body%7C%7Cd.body.innerHTML=='')throw(0);var%20s=d.createElement('link'),h=d.getElementsByTagName('head')%5B0%5D,i=d.createElement('div'),j=d.createElement('script');s.rel='stylesheet';s.href='//dotepub.com/s/dotEPUB-favlet.css';s.type='text/css';s.media='screen';h.appendChild(s);i.setAttribute('id','dotepub');i.innerHTML='%3Cdiv%20id=%22status%22%3E%3Cp%3EConversion%20in%20progress...%3C/p%3E%3C/div%3E';d.body.appendChild(i);j.type='text/javascript';j.charset='utf-8';j.src='//dotepub.com/j/dotepub.js?v=1.2&s=ask&t=mobi&g=en';h.appendChild(j);%7Dcatch(e)%7Bw.alert('The%20page%20has%20no%20content%20or%20it%20is%20not%20fully%20loaded.%20Please,%20wait%20till%20the%20page%20is%20loaded.');%7D%7D)();

more_corn 3y ago

This book contains my favorite take on the nature of consciousness.

BobaFloutist 3y ago

Wow, this looked incredibly shady, but apparently this is the author's official website. Good for him for releasing his book as Creative Commons, that's a cool move.

literalAardvark 3y ago
Cool but it's unfortunate that he was forced to do it for such a great book to live. It really is one of the best books of the last decades, in my humble opinion the best.
- aslfjiasf 3y ago
  What do you mean by "forced to do it"?
  - unaindz 3y ago
    Watts has recently made Blindsight available online through a Creative Commons license, so you can check out the book before you buy. Or perhaps make that so you can read the book if you can't buy: What I find interesting about it is that he's calling the CC release "an act of desperation more than experimentation." Watts explains his thinking here (with additional thoughts here), but the short form is that according to Watts the book got a small first printing (3,700 copies), isn't being carried wasn't pre-ordered by the bricks and mortar stores of Borders and Barnes & Noble, is hard to find in the specialty book stores, and is on the bubble as toward whether there'll be a second printing of the book or not. By putting the book out in a CC online version, Watts suggests, at least people can find it and read it. I'm citing from here which also contain links to the actual Peter Watts reasoning: http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004689.html http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004689.html
    - slowmovintarget 3y ago
      That's a crying shame. It's an incredible book. I guess I got one of those 3,700 hardcovers. It's on my shelf next to the Echopraxia hardcover.

atombender 3y ago

Fantastic novel. Fans of science fiction should not miss it. Watts' other books, such as The Freeze-Frame Revolution, are also excellent. I also quite liked the "sidequel", Echopraxia.

unaindz 3y ago
Don't forget the short story The Colonel which could be considered a prequel to Echopraxia. http://www.tor.com/2014/07/29/the-colonel-peter-watts http://www.tor.com/2014/07/29/the-colonel-peter-watts The things unoffical sidequel to The Thing is also very good. http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ He publishes lots (all?) of his books for free using the Creative Commons licence. I pirate most of my shit tbh but after reading two of his trilogies and finding them some of the best books I have read I had to donate: https://rifters.com/real/donation.htm https://rifters.com/real/donation.htm PD: Minion in the donate page kinda looks like a Petter Watts vampire but im sure he was a bless to have around.
- atombender 3y ago
  The Things is such a brilliant re-imagining of John Carpenter's The Thing. I remember reading it a long time ago before becoming familiar with his work, then re-discovering it after reading Blindsight, and of course it makes perfect sense for him to write this story. I have not read the Rifter series, is it as good as his other books?
  - lproven 3y ago
    TBH I gave up on book 1 of the Rifters. :-( Loved Blindsight, loved the Things, but DNF B-Max.
  - duskwuff 3y ago
    The Rifters trilogy (quadrilogy?) is kind of rough. They were his first published novels, and there's a kind of awkward gear-shift between the previously published material (much of the first novel was a fixup of "A Niche" and other short stories) to newly written content. There's some interesting stuff in there -- if you've previously read the Firefall novels you'll recognize some early versions of ideas and motifs which he develops more fully in the later series -- but ultimately I'd describe it as skippable.

Hortinstein 3y ago

This book is great...I am a big fan of the rifters trilogy also by Watts. They have some great fictional speculation on the Internet and how it's chaotic mix of automated agents tearing at each other that really reminds me of what could be possible with the content creation of LLMs. "In Peter Watts's Rifters Trilogy, which includes "Starfish", "Maelstrom", and "ßehemoth", the internet is a significant theme, especially in its altered, chaotic state. It is described as no longer trustworthy, having been overwhelmed by self-evolving viruses and the descendants of self-evolving anti-viruses that spiraled out of control. In this futuristic setting, the internet has been renamed "Maelstrom" to reflect its chaotic and unpredictable nature, becoming a space that is both electronic and ecological, complete with its own digital ecosystem" - synopsis I ironically used chat gpt to write

johngossman 3y ago

Just read this. Good story, crazily imaginative and original, and yet all the ideas are directly drawn from research. The book has (checks) 133 endnotes mostly from Science and Nature as well as academic texts. This could mean the story is forced, but it isn't.

unaindz 3y ago
The research is not only on this one, he does this for all his full-lenght books and he keeps the right balance between plausible, novel and interesting. Reading the author notes about the ideas and what research they are based off is an extra pleasure after finishing one of his books.

rationalthug 3y ago

On my personal list of the top ten science fiction novels of the last twenty years. Still re-read it every now and then.

KingMob 3y ago

I read this back when I was a neuroscientist studying consciousness, and it was a very intriguing premise. The title was super-relevant, since I was actually analyzing Patient GY’s data at the time! However, I think the key idea that consciousness is a local maximum in the universe is fundamentally mistaken, if a cool thought experiment. The brain is an expensive organ, and unless consciousness is truly pointless, it would be subject to evolutionary pressure like anything else. I doubt it could escape those pressures, even just within earth. The vampires were cool tho.

sho 3y ago
> I think the key idea that consciousness is a local maximum in the universe is fundamentally mistaken, if a cool thought experiment. Very much agree, on both counts. Even "just" on earth, it's not like the more mechanistic approaches didn't have plenty of chances to compete. The near-instant and very complete domination by the first species to reach a certain level - and its subsequent orders-of-magnitude raising as it then starts to compete mainly with itself - was totally driven by evolution and there's no reason to think it wouldn't happen anywhere else. The only variable I can really see is in where it (evolution-driven intelligence increase) stops. It's extremely hard to imagine even the basics such as group coordination and complex communication without some sense of self, and even the animals we see on earth with some level of these abilities demonstrate at least a proto-consciousness, which might well have won out in the end had we not been first past the post. There's no reason to think this phenomenon would be an earth-only anomaly. It reminds of the "million monkeys with a million keyboards" thought experiment. Yes, they will, given infinite time, produce the entire works of shakespeare. But in the real universe they don't have infinite time, the actual shakespeare evolved, wrote it all first, then took over the monkey planet and enslaved or at least repurposed them before they even got the first paragraph out. I don't mean to suggest that homo sapiens is some kind of universal peak of capability - we are almost certainly not - but I find it pretty much impossible to imagine sentient creatures being outcompeted by non-sentient ones under any circumstances. It's expensive, sure, but consciousness appears to be a - the - superweapon, and whoeever grasps it first, wins.
- MeImCounting 3y ago