REVIEW - Blindsight by Peter Watts (2006)

Released without much fanfare during the final quarter of 2006, Peter Watts' Blindsight is a book that has slowly been picking up a buzz over the past few months.  Thanks to a Creative Commons release, a growing pile of positive reviews and an author with a tendency to be intensely forthright in interviews (a tendency that lead Watts to be given as an object lesson in how not to deal with your publishers), Blindsight has slowly changed from being an unloved release into what is now being seen as one of the most important and challenging Hard SF novels to appear in recent memory.  A novel of rare intelligence and subtlety, Watts' work is nothing less than a triumph.

Cosmetically taking its queues from books such as Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, Blindsight is the story of a group of radically modified human explorers and their vampire commander travelling to the Oort cloud to intercept a vast alien artefact that refers to itself as Rorschach.  After a deceptively easy first bout of verbal communication, the crew decide to venture down to the surface despite Rorschach's repeated warnings not to.  This sets in motion a series of disastrous decisions that seem to lead not only to the near extermination of the ship's crew but also the profound alteration of the human race.  So far, so 2001.  However, as interesting and well written as the plot is, it in fact merely a Trojan horse for the book's true purpose; the discussion of Watts' theories on the nature of intelligence.

The book's Big Idea is that there is no intrinsic link between intelligence and consciousness.  This deceptively straightforward idea is explored through the medium of the three alien species with which Watts populates the book.

The first and most obviously Other species are the Scramblers.  Composed entirely of flailing legs and orifices, the Scramblers are so skilled at absorbing and processing information that they are able to read the electrical impulses inside a human head at distance and effectively hide in our optical blind spots within seconds of first encountering us.  However, for all their astonishing pattern recognition and processing ability, they are not conscious.  They lack a sense of self or a cogito to do the ergo summing.  They are what philosophers of mind call Zombies.  When the crew of the Theseus first encounter Rorschach's transmissions, they are quickly able to deduce that they are not dealing with a conscious mind.  This leads them to jump to the assumption that they are talking to some low-level AI operating a Chinese Room whereby signals come in and answers are shipped out without the inhabitants of the room ever understanding what is being said.  This analysis erroneously leads the crew to assume that Rorschach is uninhabited.

This mistake also underpins the crew's treatment of the second alien species in the book, namely the ship's AI.  Theseus is hugely, impossibly intelligent but the humans treat it as little more than a glorified desktop PC.  Good enough to pilot the ship and run all the machinery, Theseus is not treated as a member of the crew.  In fact, at one point, the book's protagonist mutters about the need to solve certain mathematical problems that will allow humans to upload into computers, suggesting that the computers themselves are just infrastructure waiting for their human masters to interact with them properly because, for all their raw computing power, AIs do not have minds and are not really intelligent.  This attitude towards AIs coincides with a rejection of what modern day philosophers call the Strong AI theorem.  Strong AI defines intelligence as "the possession of a model of reality and the ability to use this model to conceive and plan actions and to predict their outcomes.  The higher the complexity and precision of the model, the plans and the prediction, and the less time needed the greater the intelligence".  Under this view, consciousness is not a pre-requisite for intelligence at all.  Under this view, Scramblers, Humans and AIs are all intelligent.  Humanity's consciousness and subjectivity are irrelevant.  The crew refer to the ship as "Captain" in a semi-ironic fashion but in truth, Theseus not only runs the ship; it is also directing the mission.  Watts draws attention to this by giving the ship's AI names that carry real philosophical weight. 

Theseus, for example, refers to the philosophical paradox known as the Ship of Theseus.  Used to challenge traditional conceptions of identity, the ship of Theseus is a ship that needs to be rebuilt once at sea.  Gradually, every single piece of wood, rope and canvas are replaced, prompting the philosopher to wonder in what way the ship that finishes the voyage is the same ship that began it.  This paradox is frequently used to illustrate David Hume's Bundle theory of the self, which would in turn influence Thomas Metzinger's theory that there is no such thing as the self... only the illusory and subjective phenomenal experience of an enduring self.  Indeed, this idea of the self as a reflection rather than the instantiation of the workings of the brain is reminiscent of another philosophical allegory, namely Plato's Cave.  Plato held a very rigid and quasi-mystical conception of intelligence with grasping the Forms at one end of the spectrum and complete ignorance at the other.  In the allegory of the Cave, he compared the lowest level of cognition to being chained up facing the wall and thinking that the shadows cast by a fire were the real world.  Interestingly, in another metaphorical tale, Plato suggested that only those who grasped the Forms should be the captains of the Ship of State... this argument for government by philosopher king suddenly seems very apt when you work out that the most intelligent thing on Theseus is the thing called "Captain" by the crew.

According to Watts, our true intelligence operates at a sub-conscious level.  Our brain does many things without our needing to give it conscious instructions such as moderating our respiration rate, balancing when we walk or moving our limbs.  In fact, phenomena such as blindsight suggest that most of our perception occurs at a non-conscious level and if you have ever had to drive a car or play the piano you will know that the worst thing you can do is be overly conscious of your movements.  If this is not enough proof, then listen to some philosophers, mathematicians and scientists and see how often they refer to something being "intuitive", namely seeming true without our knowing exactly why.  For Watts, consciousness is largely irrelevant to intelligence, it is a parasite and a side effect that gets in the way of all the processing our brain could otherwise do.  This is similar to the manner in which a PC's computing power is slowed down by the need to run a cumbersome graphic interface.  The problem is that humans have come to conflate intelligence with consciousness and this explains why the human crew of Theseus do not recognise the intelligence of the Scramblers or Theseus; they do not act conscious.

The third alien species discussed in Blindsight is the vampire; Homo Sapiens Whedonum as Watts wittily calls them.  Watts' treatment of vampires is not only intensely cool; it is also a significantly innovative take on one of SFFH's most hackneyed and familiar tropes.  Here Watts draws upon his background as a biologist and attempts to give a realistic treatment of what a predator who targets humans might be like.  The first thing that Watts jettisons is consciousness.  Forced to resemble humans in order to blend in but, needing to out-think humans, Vampires have replaced consciousness with raw computing power and an uncanny ability to mirror the behaviour of its prey.  This not only makes Vampires more intelligent than humans, it also means that they do not empathise with their prey (empathy being the preserve of the conscious).  In philosophical terms, Vampires are zombies that eat humans.

As intriguing as these ideas might be, they are only sufficient to make a good Hard SF novel.  Indeed, Greg Egan's short story "Mister Volition" already examined the idea of a character that, according to Dennett and Minsky, did not have qualia (the subjective building blocks of consciousness).  What elevates Blindsight above other pieces of SF and into the realm of great literature is that, for all its scientific soundness, it is a book that expresses its ideas in a number of different ways, including symbolically through the characters.

Siri Keeton is the book's first person narrator as well as its central protagonist.  He also had half of his brain removed because of childhood viral epilepsy, prompting his parents to replace the missing wetware with a computer in the hope of giving the boy a normal life.  However, while Siri is undeniably intelligent, his condition has left him incapable of experiencing empathy for other humans.  This has prompted him to acquire the ability to read body language and situation dynamics, allowing him to emulate empathy.  These skills are what got Siri his job as a Synthesist or Jargonaut, a futuristic variant on a reporter who is able to filter high-level theorising and group dynamics and explain them to a less qualified audience.  This means that, like the Scramblers, Theseus and Vampires, Siri is part Chinese room.  However, he is also conscious therefore making him the only person who sits in both the conscious and sub-conscious worlds.  He is a bridge between humanity and the Otherness of sub-conscious intelligences.  He is part human and part zombie and this makes Siri a deeply conflicted character. 

This conflict is explored through a series of flashbacks showing Siri's failed relationship with Chelsea.  Chelsea is a futuristic analogue of a therapist, able to engineer happiness by directly rewiring her patients' synaptic pathways to exclude unpleasant memories and include happier ones.  As she sets to work on Siri, Chelsea accidentally uncovers a repressed memory of Siri's mother admitting that she infected her son with a retrovirus to get him to love her.  This leads to an extraordinary scene in which Siri rejects Chelsea's offer of further help and proceeds to accuse her of trying to domesticate him, then making things worse by implying that all relationships are little more than rape and psychological manipulation.  While Siri may well be correct as to what many relationship dynamics are like, he manages to completely miss the point... namely that we do not consciously do these things to each other, we consciously want to make our loved ones happy.  In confronting Chelsea, Siri is not only demonstrating his inhuman inability to feel empathy but also his hypocritical attitude towards social dynamics.  On one level, he is not bothered by manipulation as that is what all relationships are, but on another he is outraged because we are supposed to love each other not manipulate.  Siri therefore sees relationships purely in terms of sub-conscious desires but then rages at the inhuman nature of these dynamics.  Siri may be able to emulate empathy by being able to recognise sub-conscious behaviour patterns but he certainly does not feel any empathy for anyone and he certainly does not understand.  This is why he is both human and zombie.  He represents the flawed relationship between intelligence and consciousness as well as between humanity and the Other.  However, Watts' symbolic use of characters does not end there.

Siri's human supporting cast serve two purposes.  Firstly, Watts' use of familiar technologies makes the characters representative of SF's attempts to explore the Other.  Secondly, each character embodies a different way in which humanity has failed to grasp the true nature of expanded intelligence.

The Gang of Four is comprised of four consciousnesses within one body but her supposedly improved linguistic analysis skills prove completely useless at getting inside the head of the scramblers.  If Watts is right then there is no need for the rabbit of consciousness to sit inside our heads and work the controls... what does this mean for a head that contains four equally pointless rabbits?

Szpindel is a man who has so augmented and modified his senses that he no longer feels his own skin.  The message here is that Szpindel's humanity and consciousness are surplus to requirement.  He has achieved his level of professional expertise by internalising his scientific apparatus so that rather than reading and interpreting scientific equipment like a normal human, he is able to absorb the information in a sub-conscious way, much as we do with visible radiation or sound.

Amanda Bates, much like Szpindel represents the human extended phenotype.  Little more than a trace of humanity holding back an army of drones that would function far better without her, Bates not only symbolises the pointlessness of consciousness to intelligence, she also symbolises the body in the Darwinian sense.  According to Richard Dawkins, humans are merely vessels for their genes; their actions entirely determined by what will best allow their genes to pass themselves on.  The extended phenotype is the idea that our genes will use us to modify our environment to ease reproduction and survival.  Siri jokes about the drones being Bates' extended phenotype but in truth, the extended phenotype is Bates herself... her consciousness merely a parasite tagging along when her drones go to battle.

Wiser critics than I (to whit Sarah Monette) have argued that one of the reasons why SF has never been accepted by mainstream literary critics and academics is because SF does not hide its meaning under the bushel of subtext.  Instead, SF engages with its ideas by making them flesh and then interacting with them on a literal level rather than asymptotically through the medium of subtext.  However, as the discussion of Watts' characters hopefully suggested, Blindsight does not comfortably fit this model.  Indeed, while Watts has the knowledge and the imagination to make his ideas flesh and to have his characters engage with them, he also seems to enjoy exploring different aspects of his ideas by embedding them in the syntax, symbolism and subtext of the book.  Nowhere is this clearer than in the book's climax.

One of the most notable characteristics of Blindsight is the meticulous way in which ideas are presented, discussed and then filed away for use later.  Watts is a skilled writer who not only does a fantastic job managing the book's Big Ideas; he is also able to handle complex characterisation and the pacing of the plot.  However, as the book reaches its conclusion, this ceases to be the case and the first person narrative structure begins to implode.  Jarring markedly with the lucidity of Watts' prose and plotting, the novel's climax is a mess as strange political and personal dynamics suddenly surface taking Siri completely by surprise.  Indeed, despite repeatedly re-reading the final scene onboard Theseus, I am still not completely clear as to what happened.  I believe this is not due to a Neal Stephenson-like inability to conclude a book but rather a deliberate stylistic choice on behalf of the writer.  By having Siri's narration of the event fall apart, Watts is making a point about not only the flaws of the first person perspective as a literary device but also the enforced first-person perspective that consciousness enforces upon human consciousness.  As Watts says, if we were more like Vampires we would be able to understand that Schrödinger's Cat is both alive and dead and neither.

An utterly remarkable book, Blindsight manages to combine both the scientific literalism of traditional Hard SF and the more figurative modes of expression common to intentionally transgressive works of literary SF.  This locates Watts not as the modern heir of Arthur C. Clarke but rather Stanislaw Lem and his work Solaris (which bears a remarkable if less science-friendly  similarity to Blindsight).  This book is so thick with ideas and subtext that I feel that this review has only scratched its surface, but despite this, I warmly recommend it to anyone that wants to read not just some bleeding edge SF but a solid work of literature.