Blindsight (Watts Novel)

This is one of my favorite books and it's fun to read for anyone interested in the AI consciousness debate. https://hpmorpodcast.com/blindsided-00-announcement/ is a podcast that read the book last year. And https://blindsight.space/ is a Watts' approved website that has a short film/movie trailer for the book.

its a way overhyped book. It is not hard sci-fi at all. (Leader of the crew?!). And its imposes some questionable ideas about consciousness. Its edgy and its prose is not good. The characters are bland. I bought it, as it comes up quite often on reddit and HN. But for me it was totally not worth it. Just my 2cents.

This is one of the books that left me with the most profound sense of unease. And it deserves very high prait for being able to do that.

While people might remember it for other more striking ideas, I was impressed with how it expounds the theory behind the claims that "intelligence implies violence". That entire narrative was quite chilling.

That, and the way the author explains how to establish a means of communication using just... pain.

It's a brilliant book.

Blindsight is fantastic. The sequel, Echopraxia, is also excellent; it is very different, and I expect many people were disappointed that it wasn't just more of the same.

Also a big shout out to his less well-known novel, The Freeze Frame Revolution. It's about the crew of a "stargate"-seeding spaceship trying to stop the ship's AI, but being hampered by the fact that the AI is both near-omniscient and that they only work in short shifts before being put back in hibernation. He also wrote a handful of short stories set before and after the novel.

There's something very refreshingly direct, unvarnished, no-nonsense, and clear-eyed (some would say cynical) about Watts' style of writing. His prose tends to be tough (quite like early Gibson's noir style, with the punk attitude intact), but also beautifully cinematic. The only other write that I think comes close, aside from Gibson, is Dan Simmons with his Hyperion Cantos, but he's not nearly as darkly cynical.

I liked the ideas in Blindsight more than I liked the book. The writing is heavy-handed (trying to be gentle here), especially given how interesting the underlying questions were.

For a dissenting opinion: boring, marginally pretentious book. Tries to bring up some interesting ideas, but loses the plot along the way. Also random Dracula in space. Couldn't get myself to finish it.

I read this book and its sequel a few years ago. Interesting conceptual book that touches on some very weird ideas, which I enjoyed. But I wouldn't call it my favorite book. It's not necessarily the easiest to read. Especially the sequel.

Spoiler alert:

The protagonist is a person with severe brain damage that is AI enhanced to become this useful but also severely autistic individual that has no emotions. The novel features also features a genetically engineered vampire with psychopath tendencies. These and a few other characters end up being send on a deep space mission to combat an alien intelligence.

All this obviously requires a bit of suspension of disbelief. But as a psychological take on AI and genetically enhanced intelligence, it touches some interesting topics.

I very strongly connected with a single idea from the book, that trying to decode random bits of information requires one to waste resources and therefore can be considered an attack. Every time I try to read a message that comes from an LLM, my brain hurts almost physically, trying to detemine whether it was posted by a human or a meatproxy.

I did not enjoy this book. It felt too try-hard edgy. If they dropped the vampire it would have been better.

Edit: another thing I didn't like was how the author just dumped pages and pages of his character-notes as background information for that character. At least that's how it felt on the multi-page flashback digressions. I skipped pages and pages of the book because it was irrelevant to the story.

"If you can not upgrade, you can not retrain, if you can not retrain you become obsolete within 3 months..."

We can be utterly useless, or we can try and compete against the vampires and the constructs and the AIs. And perhaps you can tell me how to do that without turning into a-an utter freak.” pg. 252

His Rifters books are great as well. Honestly I've never read anything from Watts that I didn't really like.

The book would have been better if the author had left out this vampire nonesense. All in all, it was a bit of a drag to read. I don't get the hype. It feels a bit like Hamilton, but without the fun!

If you haven't read the book, beware of spoiler warnings in this thread! It's pretty important in this case.

Easily my favorite science fiction novel. And you can read it for free on his website!

http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

My capsule summary:

In the 2070s, on the cusp of the singularity, a swarm of alien drones takes a snapshot of the Earth before burning up in the atmosphere. A small crew of bleeding-edge posthumans, all with different physical or mental augmentations, is sent to the outer Solar System to investigate the source. The narrator, Siri Keeton, is an emotionally lobotomized "synthesist" tasked with monitoring the mission and interpreting it for the leadership back home.

I don't want to spoil its frightening twists, but suffice to say that it shapes up to be a cosmic horror novel where the horror is rooted in abstract ideas like human cognition and the nature of consciousness. The book is peppered with philosophical concepts like the Chinese Room and (real-life) neurological quirks like blindsight, all bent towards smart, existential horror. Like Lovecraft mixed with Oliver Sacks.

And while the ideas are solid -- the author is a marine biologist who fills the appendix with citations of evolutionary and cognitive research -- what I really love is the prose. Watts is a fantastic hard SF writer, filling every page with authentic, charismatic narration, cinematic imagery, and a way of talking about abstruse scientific concepts in a way that punches you in the gut and chills you to the bone. His style is like a horror version of Douglas Adams, mind-bending ideas and memorable characters with a compulsively readable flow to it.

Its biggest weakness is that one of the most compelling aspects sounds like a pulpy joke at first glance -- the ship is led by a "vampire." I can't imagine how many people read this on the jacket and took a hard pass on Dracula in Space. But it's not some fantasy gimmick -- it's the in-universe nickname for an ancient, predatory, sociopathically brilliant subspecies of humanity that's been resurrected, Jurassic Park-style, to help manage high-stakes ventures like the first-contact mission. The captain starts off intriguing, quickly grows frightening, and eventually advances one of the book's most disturbing and unforgettable arguments.

Overall, it's not just my favorite SF novel, but one of my favorite novels, period. The only book I've ever bought a dead-tree copy to be signed by the author. Highly, highly recommended.

First the reading at bayesian conspiracy, now here? Own the novel, it was often hard to read, but kinda worth it for the novel concept introduced.

Phenomenal deep book with layers upon layers of ideas. Not a easy read read for a single afternoon, this one really requires you to work for your meal; read, go back, reread with new context, ponder.

Probably a bit too heavy on ideas for most and those who are only used to lighter cost might find it boring. But for me one my all time favorite sci-fi books.

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r/printSF is unconscionably obsessed with this middling work. It's just a collection of "isn't that cool" pop-sci phenomena randomly dropped into an Aliens (1986) space horror plot. Watts in his interviews just comes across as a fanboy hack. Interstellar travel is so difficult that spacefaring aliens must have deliberately set out to do it and are thus conscious! Triffids aren't going to grow their way to Earth!

Novelists should not be giving their work away for free like that. AI is bad enough, but writing a novel (even a bad one) is hard work. It just makes it harder for novelists to make a living.

The universe, plot, and characters are all aggressively atheistic[1]. Meanwhile the prose is heavily infused with Christian religious language, references, and allusions.

Consequently, I'm not really sure who the book is for. I don't know any Christians who like atheistic hard scifi (although, I exist so there must be others). And I don't know many people into hard scifi who really care for the religious imagery.

Personally, I find the experience to be unique, so I think it's worth it if you can get into it.

Besides that (and to spoil the point of the book) the biggest flaw is that the author doesnt seem to trust the reader to get the point, which is that consciousness is an unnecessary (and detrimental) evolutionary dead end. Real intelligence is totally orthogonal.

As a software engineer who has seen very intelligent systems with no more consciousness than a paperclip for decades, I got on board with the premise as soon as it showed up. But then I kind of had to wade through case study after case study highlighting the idea.

[1] - this isnt atheism that's aggressive, but rather a universe where there's no doubt that there is no god with all of the consequences thereof.