I agree that Blindsight is highly overrated. Peter Watts devotes much of the book to ridiculous dialogue about the Chinese Room Experiment (astronauts in space apparently have nothing better to do than poorly discuss undergrad philosophy apparently).

The treatment of the Chinese Room Experiment is shallow and Watts clearly does not possess a more than rudimentary grasp of the philosophy, nor of computer science apparently.

It also felt shoehorned in. As was the vampire subplot, as other commentators have already discussed.

Felt like Watts just wanted to add in the Chinese Room Argument to make the novel seem "deep", when in fact it accomplished the exact opposite. No computer scientist that I know of takes the Chinese Room argument seriously, Scott Aaronson had a Quora answer where he mentioned how when he presented it to his undergrad class none of the students found it convincing, even after he tried to present arguments for it.

I don't like most of John Searle's work in general, but his Chinese Room Argument is obviously one of the worst pieces of philosophy of the 20th century, on par with the worst of the works ridiculed by Sokal et al.