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There was also the premise that a conscious intelligence was dramatically slower and dumber than non-conscious intelligences, because consciousness acted as an enormous waste of computational resources in the brain and slows us down reaching conclusions.vyelkin posted:that it could be possible for a species to evolve, through the boring old process of natural selection, a level of complexity that makes it capable even of interstellar travel and colonization of distant star systems, without ever being conscious of what it was doing. It wasn't blind evolution that took them to interstellar travel. The Rorschach aliens were extremely intelligent, just in a non-conscious way. The Rorschach craft was designed and bioengineered by them as an interstellar craft.
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Apr 20, 2023 14:47
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Look, I’m a triangle now! -me, in heaven, to my son who couldn’t possibly care less
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Apr 20, 2023 14:53
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It sort of posits consciousness as a short-term advantage that ends up loving itself through misplaced priorities. I think it tracks. I've spent a lot of time since Blindsight recently came up in the TBB SCIFI thread thinking about how loving stupid birds are, evolving these big dumb feathers to impress each other only to make it easy for us to see and kill them. Like if we wanted to get rid of all the male cardinals on purpose, no problem. Dipshits spent ages making themselves more visible targets to impress chicks and get laid.
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Apr 20, 2023 15:46
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Jenny Agutter posted:Story wise that’s kind of the point of “Heaven” isn’t it? They were spending massive resources to keep people’s consciousness alive without anything in return evolutionarily speaking, no reproduction, no useful work, it’s been a while but I think the implication was it also subsumed humanity’s desire to expand outwards I don't really buy that "Heaven" type stuff would be an exclusive phenomenon of conscious beings, why couldn't the aliens end up with a similar (evolutionarily) bad small scale incentive structure once they'd developed themselves out of their original context?
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Apr 20, 2023 16:58
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MikeJF posted:There was also the premise that a conscious intelligence was dramatically slower and dumber than non-conscious intelligences, because consciousness acted as an enormous waste of computational resources in the brain and slows us down reaching conclusions. I'll stop talking about this because I don't think it can really go anywhere, but I think your post reflects what Blindsight says well. The assumption that consciousness requires resources and changes decision making capabilities above and beyond what mere intelligence does is an assumption/background fact to the book that isn't really explained (it doesn't have to it's a sci fi novel!), and I think that being aware that it is a key assumption makes it easier to make sense of the book.
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Apr 20, 2023 17:02
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distortion park posted:I agree with this but for me the biggest gap is that I don't think it really specifies what the behavioural differences that consciousness leads to are - when do conscious beings expend energy that a non conscious one wouldn't? (It also supposes that it matters - maybe it's just an inevitable byproduct or certain complex systems, or maybe pansychism is right!) We spend an enormous amount of kcals on cognition, so literally constantly.
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Apr 20, 2023 17:09
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If given the option would y'all become unconscious but intelligent or as you are now? (The opposite)
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Apr 20, 2023 17:23
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Would I kill myself? No.
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Apr 20, 2023 17:28
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zoux posted:We spend an enormous amount of kcals on cognition, so literally constantly. My point is how many of them are required for consciousness vs intelligent behaviour? What activity are they being spent on that isn't also required for intelligence? e: in particular the idea in Blindsight is that consciousness itself is a disadvantage, so I'm not sure you can point to a particular behaviour which is (via some mysterious process) exclusively a result of consciousness. distortion park fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 18:08
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My posting would be minimally different if I evolved to lack consciousness. I also came to the conclusion that Blindsight was saying consciousness is a dead end, since being without it meant that you wouldn’t have the empathy or connections to make a Heaven, and instead somehow thousand monkeys/typewriter your way into space travel. That’s my main issue, really. Like. Yeaaah, I guess you could luck into getting off a planet without conscious insight, but if it’s all essentially by accident, as soon as that ship explodes because you didn’t think about asteroid protection, there’s no telling how long it would take to make it again. We’re supposed to take it as the Rorschach is that hypothetical perfect ship, but we’re never really going to get Macbeth out of those monkeys in any realistic length of time. What evolutionary benefit is there in reaching space? More room to grow and more resources, presumably. But without the consciousness to extrapolate that, why would the hiveunmind even start building a ship? Also if you asked me to go on a ship with a vampire I would say no thank you.
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Apr 20, 2023 19:23
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You would know
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Apr 20, 2023 19:26
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Well the specific function Watts, or one of his characters anyway, argues for is that consciousness acts as a mediator between stimulus and response, and that period of thinking about what you are doing slows down, for lack of a better term, processing speed. It's a bottleneck, one that degrades our fitness, and degrades it significantly against these nonconscious intelligences. I think one of the reasons that Blindsight is so challenging is that it's literally impossible to imagine you are Siri Keeton, or Rorschach, or a scrambler, because as conscious beings we cannot conceive of inconsciousness, it would be like considering swimming in an ocean without water. The bleeding-edgers are so incomprehensible to us that the protagonist of the novel exists as a diagetic exposition device, and he himself is massively atypical in terms of neurophysiology. Scramblers/Rorschach are so compelling, I think, because Watts got at something truly alien. Sci fi fans know that the aliens we read about and see in fiction are still constrained by anthropy, because while we know that true intelligent alien life is very likely to be something we cannot comprehend of, because we cannot comprehend of it, we cannot write about it. There are a lot of unanswered questions left in the novel about how technologically advanced society can arise apart from Cartesian self-awareness, because it's impossible for us to truly comprehend what that means. That Watts get so close to it is why I think Blindsight has become a modern classic. As an aside I think that Adrian Tchakovsky does a good job of creating compelling non-human, but still conscious intellects, in his Children of Time series, which involves essentially uplifted earth animals. I don't know of other works that explore the non-conscious intellect.
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Apr 20, 2023 19:32
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zoux posted:Well the specific function Watts, or one of his characters anyway, argues for is that consciousness acts as a mediator between stimulus and response, and that period of thinking about what you are doing slows down, for lack of a better term, processing speed. It's a bottleneck, one that degrades our fitness, and degrades it significantly against these nonconscious intelligences. I really like the rest of your post because you're right, part of what makes the book good is that it's so challenging for a conscious human being to put yourself in the shoes of an "unconscious" alien, and that's what makes the aliens seem so alien in the novel. This first paragraph though, gets at what I think a lot of people here are saying, which is that Blindsight assumes that the mediating effect between stimulus and response is a hindrance but not a help, not even in long-term scenarios like, say, planning and executing interstellar travel. It's like the famous Kahneman book, Thinking Fast and Slow. Maybe one reductive way to put the big consciousness debate in Blindsight is that it's theorizing: what if thinking slow isn't necessary to survive and thrive? In fact, what if thinking slow is, as you say, slowing down processing speed and becoming a bottleneck that degrades our fitness against aliens that only think fast? What if you could become a human being that only thought fast, would that give you an advantage over human beings who spend some of their time thinking slow? No mediation between stimulus and response, just response. But that assumes that thinking slow doesn't have any benefits at all, and that it would be possible to achieve things like interstellar travel with only the "fast", instinctive, unconscious thought patterns, not the "slow", deliberative, conscious ones. Those slow patterns might make you worse in a fight, the way they make the human characters worse at fighting the scramblers inside Rorschach. But I just don't buy the thesis that the slow patterns make a species worse at everything, because (albeit, this is obviously based purely in our own experience as humans, where it's not possible to imagine what it would be like to only thing fast) so many of our achievements as a species have been based in thinking slow. We didn't build airplanes or moon rockets or space stations by acting on unconscious instinct or by not pausing in between stimulus and response, because even if our unconscious instinct is really intelligent at figuring out other things, it isn't good at figuring out aerospace engineering. Blindsight shows that it's really interesting to think about what it would be like to encounter an alien species for whom that isn't true, and their unconscious instinct is really intelligent at figuring out aerospace engineering, but I wasn't convinced by the idea that humanity is at a disadvantage compared to such a hypothetical species in the grand scheme of things, outside a tightly controlled environment like hand-to-hand combat inside a radioactive organic spaceship.
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Apr 20, 2023 19:48
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Fitness is relative so you could never say that [x]trait is strictly better than [y] trait for all environments. Maybe if the scramblers scrambled on down our gravity well, we'd rinse them in ability, maybe they couldn't hide in our saccades if there are g forces, maybe some impurity in our atmosphere scalds their skin. Plot question: what is in that escape pod on the long journey back to earth that purports to contain Siri Keeton, it's implied it's something else or that Keeton's been changed into something else. Oh also shoutout to Sarasti using screaming human agony faces as his desktop, that's a huge flex. (do we know where the name 'Jukka Sarasti' is derived from, it sounds south Asian but I was always curious if it was supposed to be from the vampire language)
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Apr 20, 2023 20:04
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zoux posted:Fitness is relative so you could never say that [x]trait is strictly better than [y] trait for all environments. Maybe if the scramblers scrambled on down our gravity well, we'd rinse them in ability, maybe they couldn't hide in our saccades if there are g forces, maybe some impurity in our atmosphere scalds their skin. Jukka is a Finnish name so I always imagined him as a Finnish vampire, which is even scarier.
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Apr 20, 2023 20:14
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Hushed utterances of "perkele" whispering down from the rafters
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Apr 20, 2023 20:16
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zoux posted:Well the specific function Watts, or one of his characters anyway, argues for is that consciousness acts as a mediator between stimulus and response, and that period of thinking about what you are doing slows down, for lack of a better term, processing speed. It's a bottleneck, one that degrades our fitness, and degrades it significantly against these nonconscious intelligences. I also like the rest of the post, but I'm uncertain about some of the assumptions that go into the first paragraph (well not your paragraph but the world of Blindsight). It's not obvious that consciousness does act as a mediator between stimulus and response, in fact it seems a bit spooky if this is the case - it could be a passive emergent property of certain patterns of matter, a universal property of some aspect of the universe, something that is entirely beyond our ability intuit about, etc. zoux posted:As an aside I think that Adrian Tchakovsky does a good job of creating compelling non-human, but still conscious intellects, in his Children of Time series, which involves essentially uplifted earth animals. I don't know of other works that explore the non-conscious intellect. Solaris, ambiguously! vyelkin posted:
I don't think that a lack of consciousness is meant to prevent some equivalent of the "slow" thought patterns - in humans these are still based on physical states of the body that a non-conscious being would have access to (I assume! maybe there is something weird going on). Watt's certainly presents in that way, Siri and the vampires don't seem to be unable to behave in some way that humans can, they just have better options. The aliens are so weird and their intelligence so differently presented that it's hard to compare distortion park fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Apr 20, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 20:20
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zoux posted:Oh also shoutout to Sarasti using screaming human agony faces as his desktop, that's a huge flex. (do we know where the name 'Jukka Sarasti' is derived from, it sounds south Asian but I was always curious if it was supposed to be from the vampire language) drat I forgot about that, it's such a good detail.
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Apr 20, 2023 20:21
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Another question, Sarasti attacks Keeton to snap him back to function, I never picked up a change in Keeton before or after the attack, so what was Sarasti - or the AI puppeting him - doing exactly
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Apr 20, 2023 20:32
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“'Get out of your room, Keeton,' it[Sarasti] hissed." Jukka was trying to get Siri out of his non-empathic, "objective" way of understanding the world and connect to the pathos of humanity's situation on a base animal level. All to better convince baseline humanity of the dangers out among the stars. The difference between saying "mean global temperatures will increase 4°C with a 95% confidence limit" and "climate change is going to kill billions of us if we don't do anything!"
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Apr 20, 2023 21:31
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In Crysis: Legion the main character is supposed to be a dumb marine but he keeps using flowery language (it is framed as a first person interview) and the explicit excuse is the nanosuit makes him use big words
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Apr 20, 2023 21:50
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Yadoppsi posted:“'Get out of your room, Keeton,' it[Sarasti] hissed." That makes sense actually, thanks, I could never quite square it
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Apr 20, 2023 21:55
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Jenny Agutter posted:In Crysis: Legion the main character is supposed to be a dumb marine but he keeps using flowery language (it is framed as a first person interview) and the explicit excuse is the nanosuit makes him use big words I've seen this happen. It's why they have to call him master chief and not John Sparta
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Apr 20, 2023 21:59
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Just read the most chilling line in a Watts novel: “Sen. Meghan McCain presiding.”
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Apr 20, 2023 22:25
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I loved the rifters series but could never really get into the vampire stuff. It's really strange to me that the consensus seems to be the opposite. I'm going to have to give blindsight another shot.
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Apr 20, 2023 22:38
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yoloer420 posted:I loved the rifters series but could never really get into the vampire stuff. It's really strange to me that the consensus seems to be the opposite. I reread rifters recently and it's a lot more 2 edgy 4 u and just reads less maturely overall ngl
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Apr 20, 2023 22:44
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Jenny Agutter posted:Story wise that’s kind of the point of “Heaven” isn’t it? They were spending massive resources to keep people’s consciousness alive without anything in return evolutionarily speaking, no reproduction, no useful work, it’s been a while but I think the implication was it also subsumed humanity’s desire to expand outwards IIRC the book somewhat conflates ego and consciousness. The scramblers have no ego, but they are still biological creatures driven by needs and desires and they put their intelligence to the task of satisfying these just like us. There is no reason to assume that they wouldn't satisfy their need to avoid death by artificially extending their life. Or decide that the optimal way to satisfy other needs is to put themselves into a skinner box like 'Heaven'. And I didn't quite follow why the scramblers wouldn't have something like small talk or entertainment. Small talk is not some random pointless behavior. We have a deeply ingrained need for it because it builds and sustains relationship in social groups and in our evolutionary history functioning relationship in social groups were absolutely fundamental to our individual survival and being ostracized from them meant certain death. If scramblers are social animals they absolutely could have a biological need to talk about random poo poo like the weather and put their intelligence to the task of satisfy that need, ego or no ego.
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Apr 21, 2023 00:58
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Jukka is named after a real live Finnish guy. i don't know how he feels about being the namesake for a psychopathic vampire.
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Apr 21, 2023 01:38
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One issue is that Heaven gets loving owned by vampires so it doesn’t seem like a great survival strategy all told
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Apr 21, 2023 03:44
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I would simply not recreate vampires imo
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Apr 21, 2023 03:45
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tokin opposition posted:I would simply not recreate vampires imo 
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Apr 21, 2023 03:51
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vyelkin posted:I really like the rest of your post because you're right, part of what makes the book good is that it's so challenging for a conscious human being to put yourself in the shoes of an "unconscious" alien, and that's what makes the aliens seem so alien in the novel. This first paragraph though, gets at what I think a lot of people here are saying, which is that Blindsight assumes that the mediating effect between stimulus and response is a hindrance but not a help, not even in long-term scenarios like, say, planning and executing interstellar travel. I can't cite it right now but my understanding was that the benefit is a high degree of mental flexibility and ability to adapt to change that the Scramblers don't have, hence why e.g. they instantly go to Defcon 1 over old TV broadcasts they don't immediately comprehend. The book spends so much time arguing for how this could even possibly work that it kind of comes off as claiming it to be an objectively superior way to allocate resources, but OTOH they built a giant unthinkably expensive space gun to fight off the threat of Frasier reruns and then let a handful of screwballs in a rocketship tootle up to it and blow the whole thing to hell so lmao. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Apr 21, 2023 |
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Apr 21, 2023 16:54
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the reason rorschach went to defcon one* is that it interpreted human communication as an explicit viral attack precisely because consciousness was a completely alien concept to it and it gets its confirmation when a space ship floats out to broadcast viral signals directly at it. but it's hard to say that it really did go defcon one because it could have vaporized thesus with one of its ramscoop drones as soon as they got to big ben. I think this is sort of answered in Echopraxia with rorscach infesting the icarus beam to create portia, so it might have been intentionally not destroying thesus until it could get that set up. maybe it calculated that doing that was more valuable or worth the risk of the rorscach artifact itself being destroyed. it doesn't have a consciousness to protect, so the instant the portia scheme became more valuable, or even potentially more valuable, to it it'd have no problem letting itself get blown upGABA ghoul posted:IIRC the book somewhat conflates ego and consciousness. The scramblers have no ego, but they are still biological creatures driven by needs and desires and they put their intelligence to the task of satisfying these just like us. There is no reason to assume that they wouldn't satisfy their need to avoid death by artificially extending their life. Or decide that the optimal way to satisfy other needs is to put themselves into a skinner box like 'Heaven'. I don't think it does. The book even kind of talks indirectly at the scamblers/rorscach's needs and desires: fitness, kin selection, etc. They're just very alien to us principally because they lack consciousness. Obviously they have no desire to avoid death (scrambler "data dumping"), and rorscach as a whole may not have any real desire to, either. There's also no real reason to think that either rorscach or the scamblers themselves, specifically, are products of evolution. The scramblers are regarded as waldoes by the thesus's crew and that might be mostly true in the sense that they might have been engineered by rorscach or something back from wherever they came from. They grow in stacks, they're distributed computational nodes, and they come precharged with ATP (but can't regenerate it) points to like single-use disposable remote work modules. Entertainment, small talk, stuff like that is all a post-language process for our consciousnesses to assure themselves that we're safe with this or that person or group of people. If there's no other type of alien designing rorscachs and it's just scramblers all the way down, why would they need anything like that? Small talk would be an example of the inefficiencies of consciousness -- you don't need to spend the calories convincing yourself or someone else that you're safe and socially acceptable, scramblers would know on a more fundamental, direct level. Bees exhibit complex group behavior but don't have a need for small talk or entertainment, hyper-advanced distributed-computing bees might not either.
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Apr 21, 2023 17:31
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I always sort of got the impression that Watts based the scramblers/Rorschach design on something like white blood cells within a human body, where they serve complex functions and have a sort of intelligence that they use to identify and eliminate threats, but everything they do is in service to the larger body that they are a part of, which they serve without needing any form of consciousness to rationalize why they do what they do - but also that he probably wanted to leave it purposefully ambiguous whether that means Rorschach is like the equivalent of a larger organism like a human body, so that the aliens would seem as alien as possible and a lot of questions would remain unanswered. Like if you were somehow shrunk down to the size of a white blood cell and shot into a human body, your experience with the white blood cells might be similar to the protagonists' experience with the scramblers, but then extrapolated to a white blood cell in a human body that has some kind of alien technological capacity making it capable of interstellar travel and a bunch of other crazy stuff. e: now that I think about it, one of the characters might even make this comparison explicit at some point, as I said it's been a while since I read it.
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Apr 21, 2023 17:37
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I think that is explicitly called out yeah, or if not so heavily hinted at that your post sounded familiar
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Apr 21, 2023 17:44
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:Entertainment, small talk, stuff like that is all a post-language process for our consciousnesses to assure themselves that we're safe with this or that person or group of people. If there's no other type of alien designing rorscachs and it's just scramblers all the way down, why would they need anything like that? Small talk would be an example of the inefficiencies of consciousness -- you don't need to spend the calories convincing yourself or someone else that you're safe and socially acceptable, scramblers would know on a more fundamental, direct level. Bees exhibit complex group behavior but don't have a need for small talk or entertainment, hyper-advanced distributed-computing bees might not either. I think to make that claim you have to have a very broad concept of language (which I agree with but idk if it's popular). Lot's of animals engage it what appears to be small talk like activities - monkeys, dolphins, many birds (and I think just the appearance is sufficient in this case). Would you also attribute some degree of consciousness to all of them?. You might draw a line somewhere but at the very least I don't see how a hard cutoff can be supported.
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Apr 21, 2023 17:51
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distortion park posted:I think to make that claim you have to have a very broad concept of language (which I agree with but idk if it's popular). Lot's of animals engage it what appears to be small talk like activities - monkeys, dolphins, many birds (and I think just the appearance is sufficient in this case). Would you also attribute some degree of consciousness to all of them?. You might draw a line somewhere but at the very least I don't see how a hard cutoff can be supported. monkeys, dolphins, and many birds are all social vertebrates, though! I think the scramblers are much more analogous to bees or ants, or really, neurons or organelles of rorschach. personally I am of the opinion that anything with a model of the universe that contains itself has some degree of consciousness. eg. fruit flies probably have some degree of consciousness. maybe weird stuff like the stock market also has some sort of (extremely alien) consciousness. I think ~in real life~ something like rorscach or the scrambles couldn't help but be conscious, it's a byproduct of a computational substrate that contains a recursive world-model. It might be slow and calorie-expensive, but it's as naturally occurring a phenomena as friction or electrical resistivity. Once you contain a model of your world that contains you in it that contains a model of your world that contains you... buddy, you're sunk! You have to carry the same homunculus as the rest of us. I think Watts acknowledges this when the scrambler in captivity doesn't immediately recognize itself in the question James asks it (what's in this room, or something like that?), but I don't think you could get as something as smart and flexible as the scrambler without also getting consciousness
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Apr 21, 2023 18:04
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Crysis Legion is pretty good, way better than a video game book has any right to be.
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Apr 21, 2023 19:00
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:monkeys, dolphins, and many birds are all social vertebrates, though! I think the scramblers are much more analogous to bees or ants, or really, neurons or organelles of rorschach. Ok cool, I think that's totally plausible. It's been interesting reading posts itt and seeing different people's very different underlying models how how this stuff works. I've been reading up on the various philosophy of mind approaches because of this thread, I think that the main text of Blindsight contains a lot of what's called "substance dualism" (which goes all the way back to the Greeks!), although interestingly I'm not sure that's what the character Siri believes. The In Our Time episode on the Mind/Body problem was a good starting point for me.
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Apr 21, 2023 19:42
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I went into reading Blindsight, well, blind and it is probably the best first contact story I've ever read. His background as a PhD. biologist comes across pretty clear and while the writing as necessarily as well paced as the Expanse, for instance, the ideas are super cool and some of the most innovative scifi I've read in a decade. It actually has speculative ideas in it rather than the usual space opera with a thin veneer of hard scifi on top. It's been on of my top recommends for people for years.
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Apr 27, 2023 17:23
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