Yet another Hacker News

36 points mooreds 1 hour ago 23 comments

sxp 1 hour ago | parent

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.

zetsurin 1 hour ago | parent

Second book echopraxia is good too

phasefactor 48 minutes ago | parent

And the authors blog/website is: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/

bobbiechen 4 minutes ago | parent

Imo Greg Egan's Permutation City is a far more interesting exploration of consciousness.

jvanderbot 3 minutes ago | parent

The marginal / ancillary discussion of the usefulness of people in a post GAI world was really interesting. The best part of this discussion was that the protagonists entire job is to translate ideas that are too hard to understand into a tangible/actionalbe "surface area". Essentially - a policy-maker interface that treats superintelligence as a "black box".

I have an excerpt of the book explaining this here: https://jodavaho.io/posts/books-blindsight.html

The discussion about non-conscious intelligence was less so (I see ants every day!). But this is a new idea dense book to say the least - if you love worldbuilding, please pick it up.

bumblehean 1 hour ago | parent

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

GolfPopper 6 minutes ago | parent

Rifters should definitely get more attention. A lot like Stand on Zanzibar, circa forty years later.

devindotcom 1 hour ago | parent

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

Jordan-117 50 minutes ago | parent

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.

MattPalmer1086 21 minutes ago | parent

The "vampire" thing was a bit cheesy to be honest, despite being scientifically explained. But conceptually it was quite key to the story. There would probably have been another way to do this.

Despite that, still one of my all time favorite sci fi books. A fantastic exploration of intelligence, conscioussness and first contact.

gtsnexp 49 minutes ago | parent

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.

jsbisviewtiful 34 minutes ago | parent

Agree. Near the end of the book I was starting to skim pages

Verdex 7 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, the end was in desperate need of another editing pass. He takes you by the head, smashes your face into the ground, and then drags you for half a mile.

Anyone who gets that far into the book doesn't need to have their hand held that much. I get that it's the entire point of the book, but everything until this point has been a challenging read.

Personally, I think it might have been interesting to rewrite the whole thing such that conclusion is ambiguous.

a3w 35 minutes ago | parent

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.

tga 34 minutes ago | parent

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.

drayfield 30 minutes ago | parent

Unfortunately I have to agree with you. I finally got round to this to see what the fuss was about, and was very disappointed. Oblique to the point of baffling and unlikable characters aplenty.

trescenzi 29 minutes ago | parent

I felt similar. I finished it but couldn’t finish the sequel. The primary idea was “intelligence can take different shapes” and I kept reading to get insightful descriptions of these different shapes but they never really came. I don’t disagree with the premise it just didn’t really get across the message very well.

ceejayoz 18 minutes ago | parent

> The primary idea was “intelligence can take different shapes”…

IIRC, it was more "intelligence may be a maladaptive dead-end".

icegreentea2 10 minutes ago | parent

The book makes pains to draw a line between consciousness (or meta consciousness) and intelligence. I don't think he really argued that intelligence is maladaptive, but does argue that meta consciousness might be.

3eb7988a1663 21 minutes ago | parent

The space vampire really felt like an unnecessary add to the entire thing. Could have established similar sci-fi woo-woo with a super-intelligent test-tube baby who might have some lingering trauma from that development.

ceejayoz 18 minutes ago | parent

Watts did a whole academic presentation on the science of vampirism in the book's context. It's a fun watch and makes it feel much less random. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEOUaJW05bU

If you want a really shoehorned scifi vampire, there's a David Weber book in which it comes out of fucking nowhere towards the end.

glokta 12 minutes ago | parent

Exactly my thought. It's hard to take any sci-fi novel with space vampires seriously.

esarbe 25 minutes ago | parent

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.