As different an alien as he could imagine

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space travel, aliens, first contact

Peter Watts is a very accommodating writer. Following an increasingly popular practice, he has appended to his novel Blindsight a section explaining and discussing some of his ideas. Blindsight is the first book by Watts that I've read, so I don't know what he did with his earlier Rifter series (four books). In this book, he plunks us down in a society that is taking genetic and cyborganic tinkering pretty far, to the point of restoring recently lost species such as the Vampire, a Human subspecies that, being a predator on the next-most-efficient predator (us), has mental skills needed to lead increasingly complex projects, such as the mission to an object in the Oort cloud that seems to harbor an alien intelligence.

The narrator is a Synthesist, Siri Keaton. In this case, that means he's someone who had half his brain removed to eliminate debilitating epileptic seizures (complete hemispherectomy is now rare; functional hemispherectomy, which disables one hemisphere but leaves most of it in place, is performed on a few hundred people yearly). While they were at it, the installed some equipment in its place. Now, he is able to read body language well enough to just about read your mind. He is one of a team of four heavily altered and enhanced people sent to study the object they call Ben, and contact any aliens they might find. Their team leader is a Vampire.

The novel's title comes from the ability of the aliens, once encountered, to hide in plain sight. In the presence of one person, they can take advantage of the saccades, the tiny movements our eyes make constantly, to trick the brain into ignoring them. These aliens are really something. Watts has posited an alien physiology for which magnetic fields (really strong ones) and ionizing radiation interact with super-resistant proteins and superconducting polymers to produce creatures that read the electronic signals in a human brain at a distance, and the myoelectric signals from muscles, to read the people much better than Siri could hope to. All this is discovered over much time, and for much of the book, things keep going on in one mysterious way after another.

The tensions of studying the alien Scramblers, and an intelligence—artificial or otherwise, we don't find out—that controls their city-size orbiting habitat, pale by comparison to the tensions between the four very different human/cyborg crew, and the most-different member, the Vampire. In the end, we find that selective attention, which enables conscious beings to function in a very stimulus-rich world, is a fatal detriment to us in the presence of creatures that seem not to be conscious as we know it, but can process all stimuli in real time; their attention is not selective, so they learn really, really fast.

The concept of a Chinese Room is used to great effect to explain the difference. This thought experiment by John Searle is used to question the meaning and usefulness of the Turing Test. One the one hand, Turing asked, if you communicate with a computer by teletype, and cannot determine whether it truly is a computer, is it intelligent? On the other, Searle proposed a person in a room who receives written or printed messages that he cannot understand, but that he can recognize and find in a large (very large, I'd think!) rule book. He doesn't even know they are Chinese ideographs. He just looks up in the rule book how to respond, and writes the response on a fresh sheet of paper and passes it outside the room to an observer. Is the Chinese Room intelligent?

Some think consciousness is an illusion. Descartes offered the best reply (I think, thus I am). I know I am conscious, and you know that you are conscious. That poor soul over there doesn't think either one of us is conscious, but perhaps he (she?) just suffers from impaired self-consciousness...