Blindsight

This book gets a lot of raves, and I did enjoy it. But it wasn't all that amazing compared to the hype it gets. I think this will be an especially powerful book if you are significantly neurodivergent, which is “all the rage” with readers these days. I swear everyone thinks of themselves as neurodivergent. Whatever.

As it comes to the story... the characters are interesting. They could literally all be fleshed out better. The circumstances the crew find themselves in is a bit hard to follow at times and I think that part could be more clearly written.

3.5 stars.

Not sure if I'll follow up with the next in series.

Our Dehumanized Future


Blindsight (Firefall #1) by Peter Watts

It is the late 21st century and humanity is already being pushed off the stage. Artificial intelligence has rendered a great many human beings excess to requirements. Those that want to remain employed have to resort to bizarre augmentations and brain surgeries to stay competitive. As a result, biologists have transformed themselves in order to interface directly with sensors and distribute the minds across the equipment. Linguists may undergo brain surgery to divide their brains into different units so that new minds can share the body and process information in parallel. Synthesists exist to translate bleeding edge science down to a common denominator that can be understood by non-specialists, but the synthesists never actually understand the substance of what they are translating.

The rest of humanity is either on welfare or is moving to “heaven,” a virtual reality for their minds, while their bodies are warehoused.

In short while the human race may be holding out, notwithstanding a demographic collapse in the birth rate, it has been divided into two camps: “ghosts in the machine” without causal effect on reality and zombies carrying out assignments without, or with limited, human awareness.

And that was before the aliens took a snapshot of Earth in the Firefall.

As a result of this mysterious event, Siri Keeton awakens on the ship “Theseus” from five years of hibernation in the Oort cloud facing an immense alien structure being constructed around a sub-Jovian gas giant. Siri is a synthesist who lost the values of empathy as a child when half of his brain was removed to stop epileptic seizures. He is a high-functioning autistic who interacts with other people by miming their behavior. He's accompanied by a linguist who brain has been reconstructed to house four other persons, a cyborg military specialist, and a biologist whose control over his own body has been compromised by his augmentation for working through his instruments. There is also a vampire captain.

Wait. What???

Apparently, vampires were a real thing in human prehistory. They were smarter, stronger, and faster than humans and required a chemical in human flesh to survive. In order to avoid overpredation on humans, they learned to hibernate for decades. Unfortunately, they had a brain glitch that sent them into seizures when they saw a right angle, which never happens in nature but which became common when humans began building cities. So, they went extinct, but by the magic of genetics, their genes were reconstructed and the species was resurrected (with the need for human flesh omitted, but the predator instincts and the “cruciform glitch” kept.)

I thought that was the weirdest and unnecessary element of the book when it was introduced, but as the book progressed it made sense in the context of the book's themes of a dehumanized near future.

The crew attempts to communicate with the strange structure, which calls itself “Rohrschack,” but nobody's home.

Wait. What??? No one's home and it gave itself a name.

At this point, the author Peter J. Watts moves into a lot of really great “philosophy of mind” stuff.

It turns out that whoever is building Rohrschack is a “Chinese Room.” The Chinese Room thought experiment was developed by philosopher John Searle to explain that AI that passes the Turing Test may not actually be sentient. The AI system may just be operating according to a very advanced recipe of giving outputs in response to different inputs which make sense to the recipient of the outputs but which the system does not comprehend or understand. The parallels to Siri are apparent, but, also, there are parallels to vampires, who exist in a “half-dreaming” state closer to their predatory role, where they constantly calculate cost and benefits without a moral overlay.

The Theseus crew eventually discovers living entities about the Rohrschack which should not be intelligent but which are clearly much smarter than humans on an individual basis. This leads to speculation among the crew that the aliens have sacrificed self-consciousness as unnecessary to the evolutionary imperative of survival.

While all this philosophy is going on, the action never stops. This book is a page turner. I became invested in the characters for all their autistic weirdness.

Ultimately, the book concludes with the unsettling notion that perhaps consciousness is a losing proposition and the vampires are the future.

This is a very good book

One of the toughest reads I did in along time. It is well researched and if you have the motivation to look up only half of the technical terms used in the book, it will bring to great little niches of science to delve into. While this actually didn't deter me, I did feel that the detailed descriptions of the surroundings actually were more confusing than helpful of painting a picture. It's great to read once of how big in kilometers the orbit is, but I dare anybody after reading this book to actually explain to me of how the ship interior looks like and how the endeavours to the alien ship worked out. With all that text, I was still lost.

I actually do think it was a brave choice by the author make the narrator incapable of empathy, and therefore very hard to sympathise for. He also removed almost any real interaction between the characters. Except for small exchanges between the protagonist and his girlfriend, there is no real communication between them. Mostly they are just stating scientific facts and offer expositional narrative. That may have been one of the core ideas behind the book, but for me it was tough to have no characters to latch onto. It made it a very draining book just because of the emotional emptiness.

I really did like the far reaching thinking of how much humanity can stretch itself with the help of technology and far it can bring us and remove us from ourselves. But unfortunately this is mostly embodied by technological or genetics gimmicks in of the characters, which are super interesting by itself, but also make the characters feel like archetypes as they offer little beyond their post-human technology, as they are lacking in emotional impact.

Especially the leader of the crew was one of the weaker points for me of the book, which brings me to the somewhat spoilery part of the review. The leader of the crew is a vampire. The year is 2082 and humanity found out through genetic engineering that actually, vampires did exist! They are far more superior in intellect than every other human being and of course they brought them back to live. Jurassic “Ann Rice” Park. Why does it have to be vampires? Not just genetically engineered beings? Nope, vampires. They did exist, and yes, they can't look at crosses, because their superior brain and superior pattern matching powers can't deal with right angles. They were wiped out when people build houses, so literally because of rectangles. So in 2082 they are swallowing “antiEuclidean” pills to make them feel round and whole. Every time that character appears, it is hammered into the readers mind, that he is superior, that he is a hunter and that the other puny humans of the crew are just his prey. I do understand that he is on the edge of what the aliens do represent (I don't want to spoil here) and I actually also think that he was actually the only character that was developed (if only in the last third of the book) but that whole vampire thing and the repetitiveness of the hunter-prey relationship really dragged the book down for me. In combination with the hard to follow descriptions made it out to just three stars despite its stellar ideas.

Great book. I really enjoyed the philosophical argument put forward about consciousness and humanities place in the universe.

> “It matters,” she said, “because it means we attacked them before Theseus launched. Before Firefall, even.”... She leaned forward, bright-eyed. “Imagine you're a scrambler, and you encounter a Human signal for the very first time.”

So the central premise is interesting and it's very well illustrated by narrating the story and background from the view of a person with a particular brain condition that has been imperfectly rectified by future medicine.

This is hard sci-fi. I thought Andy Weir's The Martian was technical and grounded in reality but it reads like an Ikea assembly manual in comparison. This is hard in every sense of the word and I'd need another reading just to digest half of what's going on here. As a first contact story it's more terrifying than the crew on the Nostromo encountering Giger's alien. This thing screws with you on an entirely different level that is at once entirely indifferent and yet hyper aware. I'm butchering this, I feel like a 3rd grader trying to explain the Kama Sutra - I'm just not equipped.

Self awareness as a costly evolutionary hiccup that wasn't meant to happen. Vampires need to take anti-Euclidean drugs so they don't have grand-mal feedback seizures when faced with right angles. Saccadal glitches in human vision, alien hand syndrome and a robust complement of end notes grounding story ideas in cited research. If you want a hefty dose of philosophy and mind-fuckery in your book this is the thing for you. ...and it's available for free on the web.

In a distant future where humanity's reach has extended into the cold void of space, Peter Watts' Blindsight invites us into the ultimate existential riddle. A crew of post-human misfits, led by a vampire commander (WTF but it works), ventures into the unknown to confront an alien intelligence that defies comprehension. What unfolds is not just a clash of species, but a confrontation with the very nature of consciousness itself.

Watts crafts a narrative that probes the fragile boundary between intelligence and awareness, between being alive and truly knowing it. In a universe where evolution favors efficiency over understanding, is consciousness a gift or a fatal flaw? “We're not thinking machines,” Watts reminds us, “we're feeling machines that think.” This book strips away the comforting illusions of free will and identity, leaving us bare before the abyss. It asks us to consider the price of progress when the mind itself becomes a tool, an artifact of natural selection with no inherent meaning.

Published in 2006, during a time of rapid technological advancements and growing debates on artificial intelligence, Blindsight feels eerily prescient. Watts, a marine biologist turned sci-fi prophet, constructs his story with scientific precision and philosophical depth. His characters, more machine than human, echo fractured, post-human landscapes. In Watts' universe, the future is a dark reflection of our present fears—about AI, about the unknown, about ourselves.

With the cold precision of a scalpel, Blindsight dissects what it means to be sentient. It's not just a question of seeing but of understanding what we see—or not seeing at all, which is its own form of awareness. Watts dares us to face the truth that in the grand scheme of the cosmos, consciousness might be nothing more than a cosmic joke, a fluke of evolution that blinds us to the real nature of reality.

Reread 2/19/2015

I first read this book over 5 years ago. I rated it 4 stars, and in that time I have never stopped thinking of this book. It improves with a reread, and details and concepts I missed the first time stand out well in the reread.

Downside to this book is that I get so caught up with the concepts raised that I can easily spend more time thinking about about them than actually reading.

I'd also call this a very fine example of what I love about science fiction.

What this book is not:

This is not horror. Granted, it can be creepy as hell, but not for reasons most people would consider horror.

This is not and action or adventure. Don't expect lasers or battles. This is a book about concepts.

What concepts you may ask? Well I leave that up to the reader to discover. It is the discovery and realizations which are half the fun. :)