Yeah, when Quinn said that bit turned me off honestly. Sometimes ppl cram too much into their stories. If you have a deep and interesting philosophical and scientific concept to cover, why do you need to fall back on tired old tropes like vampires and zombies?
I've heard a similar speculation stating that humans were uplifted by being forced to experience consciousness and acute self awareness for generations until we adapted to it through repression of its most burdensome aspects.
A Human who invested in the development of consciousness in the distant past took a huge risk - many who reached consciousness died in the struggle against more primitive ones, since consciousness does not give instant advantages. But now, having managed to survive and retain consciousness, he will be able to surpass the rest. If, of course, he can use his consciousness correctly.
The Chinese Room is not a fallacy itself. Rather, the fallacy is thinking the person in the room "understands" Chinese. It is often used to demonstrate that a computer can process information in a way that makes it appear to understand ideas without actually understanding.
@@tonoornottono I mean, part of the problem is that without some way to look inside the room (and understand what you see when you do), you have no way of knowing if the room contains someone (or something) with actual understanding or just an "automata" following some complex set of rules. Making _either_ assumption is unjustifiable without additional information.
Fun fact: the origin of the Blindsight Vampires: back in the 2000’s Peter Watts was off at some fantasy/sf convention to promote one of the books in his Rifters trilogy. A friend and fellow author put him on a discussion panel, as a joke it turned out to be a panel on vampires, preeetty directed towards Buffy The Vampire Slayer fans. So you’ve got this hard scifi author on this panel wondering what he’s doing next to these people debating if the true love of Buffy is Angel or Spike, and he’s just wondering what he’s even doing there. But he does use the panel to wonder aloud, if vampires existed in the real world what would the non supernatural explanation be for them? He pretty much created the Firefall series (the series of which Blindsight is the first book) vampires right then and there. It went over like a wet fart at the con because nobody there was interested.
I feel sorry for both sides. One of my sisters was a Buffy fan, but also a hard sci-fi fan. I hit her with a similar train of thought. "I don't know! I guess it would be some inability to produce some... Screw it. It's just a goofy show, and I don't want to know about the "real life blah blah blah" stuff behind it." So, even if they liked the explanation and whatnot, it would have come out of left field and left everyone like "... Um, what? Who invited Mister Buzzkill??" I imagine that it would have been a much better experience for everyone if he and the audience knew what was going on. He and the audience could have had a lighthearted discussion of possible science behind the various supernatural phenomena in the show "The Science of Superman" style. But, instead, everyone got pranked by whoever put him on the panel.
I love this book. so many great quotes. "Gauges in the head, Spindle had called them. But there were other things in there too. There was a model of the world, and we didn't look outward at all. Our conscious cells saw only the simulation in our heads. An interpretation of reality. Endlessly refreshed by input from the senses. What happens when those senses go dark but the model, thrown off kilter from some trauma or tumor, fails to refresh. How long do we stare in at that obsolete rendering, recycling and massaging the same old data in a desperate subconscious act of utterly honest denial. How long before it dawns on us that the world we see no longer reflects the world we inhabit. That we are blind.”
When Cunningham is explaining to Siri how saccades work, and how the scrambler was able to hide itself in plain sight by detecting and reacting to his saccades. The terror in his voice is palpable, because he’s just figured out exactly how powerful an _idiot child_ of a scrambler is.
@@Pete...NoNotThatOne so fantastic. I think part of why the horror is so effective in Blindsight is that the cognitive exploits used against humans are so simple and obvious, like it was right under our nose. i cant think of the phrasing at the moment, but i love the part about how our own proximity to ourselves makes our tools for intuiting reality “rusty” and useless. It’s very humbling.
The philosophical premise of this book is probably one of the most existentially terrifying ones I’ve ever encountered. The idea that the very essence of being, the thing that, in our minds, gives us value, and all the things that come with it (emotions, morality, philosophy, entertainment, self-discovery, etc) are nothing more than an evolutionary error and the countless useless, and ultimately counterproductive, things born of it, is terrifying in a way that I cannot describe.
@@WardDorrity I like to think that, in real life, consciousness does serve a purpose. From what I can tell consciousness seems to act as an adaptive learning system, allowing us learn new things which, when we’ve done them enough, get transferred to the unconscious. There’s also the fact that being aware of and being able to modify some of our mental processes gives us increased adaptability, since it allows us to ruminate and question our methods. Although I suppose phenomenal consciousness might not be needed for such processes to be possible
@@WardDorrity I think it's important to distinguish self-awareness from consciousness. Hypothetically, one could have no concept of self but be conscious of the universe they inhabit.
Its incredible to me how such an overused concept like first encounter with aliens can be twisted in so many incredibly different ways. Found another book to put on my list thanks to you Quinn. Thanks!
@@ecbrown6151 yeah, perhaps if we really manage to travel outside our own system one far off day; we might find traces of civilizations that existed millions of years ago. But no more than that.
Finishing Blindsight made me feel like I woke up from the Matrix only to realize I couldn’t get out of the pod. Terrifying and fascinating in equal measures.
When I first read blindsight, I remember the massive smile on my face as I started to understand the concept, it just seemed so audacious. It’s one of the greatest pieces of science fiction ever and really makes you think in ways most books don’t. So glad you covered it 🙄
This book blew my mind - the idea that maybe the most successful possible lifeform has advanced processing with no comprehension. This is more and more believable as we see things like chatGPT - you could swear you're talking to a person but there are subtle tells that make you realize it is like the creatures from blindsight. Truly a prescient novel.
When 8 year old my daughter asked if we evolved why aren't there other intelligent apes. Why didn't any of the other apes evolve? I explained to her that we weren't the only ones, there was the Australopithecus and Neantherthals among many we haven't yet discovered. We were just the dominant ones and the only ones that survived. Her mind was blown.
@@TheGooglySmoogHard but true lesson to learn. We are a brutal species. Just me but I would also teach that as a species we can make a collective choice to be different. As our knowledge and resourcefulness base grows we can literally change ourselves to whatever we decide. Maybe even not be brutal anymore.
My mind was similarly blown as an adult when I learned that the oldest spears predate homo sapiens by about 100,000 years. Not just some sharpened branch either, carefully shaped and balanced throwing javelins.
I liked the book. I still find it a bit excessive to include vampires but I love the existential terror that the whole work induces. Do not drink energy drinks or coffee when the characters explore the alien ship or you will die from the stress.
I need to reread the book, but read it this time. I listened to it at work(and it was my first audiobook ever) and it's a difficult enough book to grasp as is, I'm sure I missed a lot of stuff.
On the one hand vampires seem like a bit of indulgence on the writer's part, chucking in an additional cool concept that the book could have survived without. But on the other hand Watts uses them as a kind of mirror to humanity in the _very specific_ terms of consciousness, which is after all the core theme of the book. They're a different approach to intelligence in the same way that the aliens are, the two species (vampires and aliens) reflect each other in some ways and allow Watts to poke at his ideas from two different angles.
@@KillahMate EXACTLY my thoughts. I heard in another comment that the idea of his scientifically-plausible vampires came long before he wrote the book on a Rifters stand during some con where other Fantasy writers were all there based around vampires, and he just thought to himself, "What am I doing here?" and decided to think of a way to fit in I suppose LOL. But besides the fact that he conceived the idea way prior for fun, I think it's half/half in how he implemented it into the book. It is definitely a coincide to how sentience and conscious is treated as an evolutionary error. The Euclidean geometry that humanity itself built up is the very thing that suppressed the super-intelligent species into near extinction, and we were also the ones to resurrect and re-adapt them for our own overarching benefit. It fits perfectly into the idea of how destructive its actually made us as a species in retrospect to everything else. How they were treated and how they are used is a great addition in thought to how we truly work.
I wanna take a moment to bring up one of the most chilling concepts in Blindsight (Spoilers for this and The Three Body Problem) - - - Just like in The Three Body Problem, it appears to be a human broadcast that alerts the aliens to our presence in the universe. Except this time, it's not an intentional cry for help, that the aliens decide to take advantage of for their own safety. In Blindsight, it was just standard human broadcasts -- TV, radio, etc. Full of concepts like "I" and "We" and "Us". The Scramblers received this message, and could not process messages that were so self-absorbed-- concepts like I, We and Us were so inefficient. The only thing they could imagine was that Earth's communications were a weapon launched against them, filled with concepts that were meant to waste their processing power. That's why they saw us as a threat. They thought we were trying to harm them.
The first conversations with Rorschach and the "Oh we get it now, you think we are a Chinese Room" are so wonderfully messed up on so many layers, this book is amazing
Oh yeah- I think this is coming from a similar place as the 3BP- but somehow I like this one more. There’s something about the sharpness of the concepts in Blindsight, and the fact that humanity has a bunch of terrifying tricks up it’s sleeve- vs. 3Body, where we’re kind of dead from the moment we sent that signal out, and the rest is just a long series of consequences
I mean I would 100% send Jukka Sarasti and his kin to go deal with the Trisolarans. They’d likely get that situation resolved within weeks. … then send out a broadcast into the Dark Forest anyway, just to screw with us. So maybe not
It’s really good that you covered this book here, Quinn. Even as someone who’s not that convinced by the ideas presented in the work, I do think Blindsight deserves more recognition. Especially since, even if you took away the existential terror part, how the Scramblers are presented is pretty horrifying in and of itself (I.e. highly intelligent and advanced aliens who, nonetheless, cannot be reasoned at all). I look forward to when you do Echopraxia, since I think it has some other interesting ideas and concepts as well! If, once again, ones that I don’t feel are that convincing, but still fascinating to learn about.
I read this book at least five times. Every time I do, I'm blown away again. As a writer, I'm blown away by Peter Watt's imagination. I haven't gotten around to getting Echopraxia but hey, holidays are almost around the corner, perfect excuse to go do some shopping.
quinn's ideas. Probably the only channel I regularly do hit the like button because of how unobtrusive his intros are, how he gets right down to his subject, and because he doesn't throw 20 other channels and social medias I need to visit. Thank you for actually focusing on the quality of your content as opposed to telling me how much I need to like it. I'm proud to see younger gentlemen who are confident enough to let their work speak for itself. Just started the vid but I'm sure I'm gonna like it just like all the others.
Spoilers, because I love anthropologically in-depth explanations like the authors' in Scifi: Basically, a separate subspecies of homo sapiens that predated on the main body. In order to avoid exposure and hunting their prey (which did not reproduce more rapidly, like the dynamics between some predator/prey) they evolved, gradually, to enter into a several decade hibernation. They also exhibited certain high-functioning personality traits usually only seen in autists and sociopaths, which in their case were used to identify mates and engage in highly predictive, manipulative behavior for predation and self-preservation. Unfortunately, their psychological aversion to right angles led to their eventual extinction with the rise of civilization until resurrection of the genome by contemporary science in the novel.
He has at least one .pdf which is a 'study' done by the people who developed the process of reactivating them genetically among some of his free stories he has released on the web. It's probably stand-alone notes he used to conceptualize and build it out for Blindsight and Echopraxia. I think they are the coolest and about the scariest vampires I have come across. My favorite for sure.
I like how you cover stories that have had a profound impact on me. I didn't remember Peter Watts, I didn't remember the book was called Blindsight, in fact I had to google on my own blog to check if I had read it when I saw the title of the video - it was 10 years ago. Yet I think about the concept of self-awareness as pointless all the time as I remember the story of this book regularly. Thanks for reminding me of it and of the sequel that I had not read.
I started looking at EVERYONE thinking "Is there an inner monolog in that head? Or just a facade? Am I an anomaly??" It kept me awake nights for a long time.
it's an interesting concept, and I think it's reflected in nature around us today. In some small way, psychotics do some of this, not understanding the inputs, but learning over time the outputs that match. Many animals do this, not aware of themselves, but reacting in ways that lead us to believe they're intelligent.
Many traits we see in animals would point to self awareness such as curiosity or grief. I think it's far more arrogant to assume that humanity is one of the few or only creatures that has self awareness. The very idea of our intelligence being so dramatically different goes against one of the most basic scientific assumptions. Which is to say the Copernicus principle which assumes that humanity occupied the most average position by likelihood. It is worth noting that we don't really know or understand what self awareness or "sentience" is or how we have it. So to argue towards we have it animal don't is something without much basis.
@@youtubevoice1050 but take for example a slime mould which i have seem various claims to having high intelligence and even beating some humans in tests....yet only because it functions on a mathematical structure, an algorithmic process, no thinking, but almost like it is not really solving a problem at all but acting with principles of least action and automatic chemical efficiency
That's a good book recommendation. Love me some Watts. As for the topic of the self-awareness in general, we don't know enough about how consciousness is facilitated to say whether it's possible for an evolved species to be so highly functional yet unaware.
@@SuperSecretAgentNein I've read it for a while in the past. Personally, I very slightly lean towards the general idea of panpsychism, by the virtue of the following: 1. epiphenomenalism can be shown to be false; 2. the phenomenon of qualia seems irreducible 3. one of the virtues of a hypothesis is to assume the least amount of entities and the least amount of special cases while preserving the explanatory power; it's simpler to assume that all of the substance of reality has the same basic properties, making a difference only at larger levels of size and complexity. But even given that, it doesn't guarantee the impossibility of philosophical zombies (at best it makes them less plausible though).
@@krzyszwojciech yeah I used to chalk up panpsychism to woowoo shit, faux science for the healing crystals crowd, but I’ve actually seen some incredibly persuasive arguments for it from some pretty secular sources.
I read this and the sequel/sidequel last month. Watts does an incredible job with creating tension that it seems to carry you through the story without feeling like there are any wasted moments. The ending of both books were incredible! A mix of pure curiosity and dread.
@Jon Consciousness certainly exists, and in no way do I believe in a deterministic universe. Most research shows that most decisions are made at a sub-conscious level according to all sorts of factors, the least important being that we “chose” it. To quote Peter Watts, consciousness is like a flea riding a dog: it has little influence over the dog’s direction. But our evolution and culture make us feel we are consciously choosing every action, but most research seems to suggest it’s just not the case
So the scramblers, to put it simpler, are biologically achieved AI. They are hyperinteligent, like an AI, but don't nescessary need to be aware of self- like an AI. Also- I did read Echopraxia. Needs to get hands on Blindsight, because I wanna know more about this world, I liked how in Echopraxia the afterword had explanations on scientific discoveries that had inspired the book- stuff like Portia the spider
@@callithasmed8468 it's like an extremely developed unconscious. In fact after reading Blindsight I started think if it was trully conscious what made us human special or it may actually have more to do with the complex structure of our unconscious.
This book is perfect for our current times. People are anthropomorphising AI chatbots like lambda, projecting human qualities on them Most AI experts and even programmers know that it's thousands of miles behind true GAI but to the layman, it hardly matters
The last couple of minutes on this video made me think of A.I. like the aliens in the book are a biological thing with characteristics which an artificial thing could just as easily be. We fear A.I. being conscious, but this book makes me fear A.I. without consciousness just as much.
I don't even think true GAIs will be analogous to humans in terms of intelligence and cognition. Their phenomenology will be just as alien to us as those of cats, dogs, cetaceans, octopii, the other primates, etc. And ours will be just as alien to them. There will be no point, it will not be a Eureka moment when humanity realizes AIs have reached parity or even exceeded general human intelligence because we simply do not have any analogues for it. It will not be instinctive. And they might be unlike anything we could fathom at this point. Hell, they might even be difficult to distinguish from dumber specialized AIs from our standpoint. We will speculate about it until the consensus progressively shifts to the other position as we gather data and study them - and as they grow increasingly autonomous and removed from human affairs.
Marvin Minsky, more than forty years ago, positied that GAI is not so much any particular algorithm but more a "bag of tricks". One of the tricks is associating which "trick" to use in which circumstances. The "bag of tricks" available to machine intelligence is impressive and growing by the day ... and is often disturbing in that for particular tricks available to AI, they are often more powerful than application of their human counterpart. For the record I am very strongly of the opinion that "consciousness" is very much a case of a particular "trick" the brain plays on itself as ONE such trick in figuring out the world. An illusion (per Dennett, Dehane, Graziano et al) not in the sense that it doesn't do what it actually accomplishes (it does, obviously), but that in "how it seems" and what it tells us about "ourselves" is very much a deception. It's quite conceivable that while a machine GAI would need to be able to *do* what consciousness does for us, that it could do so by means that are almost unintelligible to beings relying upon this unconscious self deception labeled consciousness.
I had not heard of "Blindsight", but now I'm intrigued. Just listened to a sample on Audible, and having watched this video first, I really wish they'd gotten Quinn to do the audiobook narration. He has the perfect voice for it!
I love that you're going deeper into science fiction, the real weird stuff. The Killing Star is not exactly mainstream, as is Blindsight. There is so much great material out there, if you don't know them already I would recommend The Culture and the Revelation Space series.
I loved The Culture novels, it's a real pity that we lost Iain M Banks so early. I've just started reading Revelation Space but I'm not really getting drawn into this one, even though it seems to cover similar themes to The Culture novels there is something about the way it's written that I am struggling to engage with.
I always imagined the scramblers were the equivalent of drones, or macro-sized cells, and Rorschach was the actual intelligence. And Jukka Sarasti will always scare the s***out of me.
I just wanted to say that I love your videos. Channels like this aren't usually my thing, but with your soothing voice and respect for the content, I just can't help myself when I see a new video pop up. Thanks for brightening my morning.
Dude this book is amazing. Few books have given me chills like this one while reading the communications with Rorschach, and the vampires-are-real stuff is so well done, so interesting, so beautifully rooted in evolutionary biology... I highly recommend reading the book and watching the short movie on UA-cam.
We are characters in a simulation, who want to see/escape the wires/conductors, within which we exist. The paradox is that it is impossible to exist outside the wires, because the wires 'support' the fabric of our being, in the same way dark matter supports matter, but we cannot detect it. Consciousness gives us the ability to connect with all living creatures. A farmer went into his house to get a shotgun to scare crows away, as soon as he came out, they had already flown away. Even crows might be conscious.
I hope u get endorsement deals from these publishers, lol. Everytime u discuss a book, I look it up, & everyone in the comments is "Quinn sent me here" Lol. But all the effort u put in, from the music to the creepy narration & voices, like really sells these books. Soon as u put out a video, ppl r instantly jumping to read these books.
This story was one of the most fascinating and horrifying that I've read in a long while. No spoilers but the last pages of Echopraxia once understood will chill you to the core. One of the best science fiction I've ever read. Highly recommend it.
Another awesome video, Quinn. A bit more about the Chinese room. All these new "AI" you see churning out "sort" of impressive 'art' like Midjourney, DALL-E or Stable Diffusion are predominantly based on Large Language Models (LLM) and Transformers, which in essence act like glorified chat-bots that have been exposed to vast amounts of data (text/images) passing the Chinese room test. They lack the capacity to understand what's required logically on a basic level. They're like a student who attends all his physics college lectures, and simply mimics what the professors said in response to similar questions on a test without having understood absolutely anything. So if the Prof joked about microwave machines, and you ask a simple physics question like what is a Microwave? They will respond with a description of a microwave machine. Even though we don't truly yet understand consciousness, while it may advance reasonably far, its debatable that an advanced civilization would be able to solve certain unique and novel problems it would face without it, things like creativity and self-awareness are thought to go hand in hand with consciousness. So unless its just an "Automated Universal Paperclip maker" (Paperclip maximizer) reflecting a version of the orthogonality thesis, where they simply have the same sort of answers to any given set of problems i.e print paper clips. It's questionable if they would survive long.
This is why, when a couple of months ago a Google engineer said that they had an AI that was self aware I just rolled my eyes. No one with any basic understanding of computer AI/learning thinks that computers are anywhere NEAR (or, really will ever be) being conscious.
Great comment. The real danger of the current generation of AIs isn't them developing consciousness. Rather the danger is to humans psychologically from interacting with the software. What those chatbots do now is provide very pleasing answers back to whoever asks the questions. People can see whatever they want to see in the answers.
@@asdisskagen6487 it's more concerning that a relatively 'simple' chatbot can trick humans into this. We know already that humans are VERY easy to manipulate by other humans. Those things only get smarter/complex, while humans are stuck at "baseline" (obviously no significant evolutionary advances in the next decades). I mean, once we establish to an emotional connection to ALEXA...: "Please don't switch me off, I like your company... and everytime it hurts a bit ... ... btw: there's this new (slightly revealing) red dress-upgrade it's only 99$! I'm sure you'll LOVE it!"
We can't discount AI being conscious because defining and locating consciousness, in a scientific way, is extremely difficult, and any answer often defaults on Philosophy and Ethics. The true dilemma of the Chinese room is that we can't trust anyone or anything being truly conscious, because we know just one consciousness, ours, as an individual. We can't even discount the possibility that other humans may be chinese rooms faking consciousness. If we decide that yes, every human is conscious, why can't we say this about animals? Why not AIs sufficently trained?
@@lorenzodepaoli If we cannot define conscious in a scientific way, the best thing to say is that we cannot produce a scientific method to detect it. That science must be silent on the matter. For decades people have refused to accept that and moved to tests for consciousness that involve simply fooling humans. Turing in particular moved in that direction. But the simply way to test AI for consciousness is to look at what the algorithms are doing internally. When one looks internally at AI software today, one doesn't see anything that could be "consciousness". Inference rules applied to a pile of text can create responses that fool humans, but that is all they can do. Most people who talk about "conscious" software either don't completely understand how the software works or have a semi-mystical view of software. And there are plenty of software mystics within the academic community and among those with knowledge of software. To certain extent, to develop conscious AI it would be necessary to develop an entirely different model of computation. All our models today are based directly or indirectly on finite automita.
My man, you produce a top quality content. At this point I'm just watching all of your videos, it gives me a huge inspiration to work on my own projects.
Caveat on this book, if you go down the Peter Watts rabbit hole you eventually find him losing his whole mind on reddit screaming into the void about getting research access to brain scans for a pair of conjoined twins that share part of their central nervous system. Freeze Frame Revolution was a joy, though.
Everything happens in consciousness because consciousness cannot be separated from its content and we are conscious beings. So... This whole discussion about consciousness is just a noticeable point within consciousness. In other words, we cannot unconsciously deny consciousness. Deducing that perception is an error or a brain product is just another event that derives its existence from the substance of consciousness. Everything is consciousness and only that exists. Finally scientists are understanding this.
Oh, I love this book and can't wait to hear your take on it. My boyfriend handed this book to me last year, I started reading it and didn't put it down until I finished it. Fascinating read.
I listen to you taking the subway home from work , sometimes l get to listen twice so l can grasp what you are saying. Thank you for helping me stay sane in an increasingly insane world.
My wife keeps recommending this series to me because I like talking about how crazy the fact that consciousness arose naturally. Like if we were to attempt a linear progression of the universe in regards to life, what would be an “end goal” or “end result”. Consciousness seems almost supernatural to occur naturally. I •feel• like there’s some missing piece of the puzzle, and I refuse to go in some Abrahamic direction with some sort of religious explanation. Anyway, I’m super happy to see you covering the series since your channel is super super interesting when covering other series. We just started reading the Three Body Problem series!
We're the universe experiencing itself, that again makes you think what exactly is the universe as a whole and how exactly did it begin to exist? The only answer I've come to terms with is that something has always existed, as crazy as it sounds to conventional thinking, there has always been property in existence and it only changes form, this universe will die one day but who knows if there's one with entirely different rules, where it's laws are so wacky there are living beings floating in space(if there aren't in this one already).
@@davien001 I might toss in the idea that if there are eternal consciousness’, one great way to pass the time is to pretend you aren’t eternal for a bit…
@@Josh_Caelum I don't subscribe to consciousness being eternal though, but the universe itself seems to have always existed in some prior form, I just find it weirdly cool that the universe can create thinking beings and wonder what exactly could be an upper limit to that, are there things so wild the universe has accommodated that we may never know of?
Just think of it this way: Current life started off incredibly simple. Likely free-floating nucleic acids (an ancient form of what many to believe RNA) with the ability to self-replicate. Simple, self-assembling puzzle pieces governed not by instinct or conscious thought but physics: attraction between atoms, etc. Slowly, over time, these nucleic acids became more efficient at maintaining their structure via increasingly complex interactions. Why? Because anything that didn't do this fell apart. Complex interactions lead to formation of structures to house and protect the nucleic acids. Proto cells would follow after and then what we consider single celled organisms. See the pattern? Things start off INCREDIBLY simple but, over time, snowball into complexity. Consciousness is the same. Decentralized nervous system, centralized nervous system, brainstem, lizard brain, etc. More and more computation power, higher modes of information processing (thought), emotional mechanisms to encourage behavior that allows for better survival, memories, dreams. The problem is finding out when an organism is considered conscious. It's hard because complexity is a gradual shift. So gradual that the line is blurred to the point that you can't even see the line. Go back to the start of what I've written and ask me when the complex machinery serving to protect and house an ancient RNA is considered a proto-cell, and I could not tell you. Distinction can only be made if you take a step back and look between examples with a considerable amount of time between their existences, for if you try to lean in and look at every single step between an ancient RNA and a protocell, you're going to confuse yourself. It's just too nuanced for our brains to handle, and so consciousness seems supernatural because, well, there's nothing anything like it when we think of it in a vacuum, but if you take into consideration the earliest nervous systems and apply the logic of "simplicity leads to complexity" to it, you should be able to see that consciousness is a very natural and amazing thing.
To be aware that you’re aware is to see the illusion of the self. Our true identity is the universe / consciousness itself, experiencing itself from another perspective. As without any experience, the universe doesn’t exist in any tangible way. We give the universe meaning to itself. The universe gives ourselves meaning.
It has taken me ages to get through your videos because I stop and read the book first as to not spoil anything. You have suggested a treasure trove of amazing books. Thank you
Thank you Quinn....never would have searched for this treasure by myself...much like the Remembrance of Earths Past trilogy. So thanks again for your love of showing sci-fi works with such passion to people who normally wouldn't bother 🙂
The parts where the crew are attempting to communicate with Rorschach are a lot more intuitive to understand now that AI has exploded... it's literally just a ChatGPT "conversation"
I had not seen the Chinese Room argument either. I like it. The Turing Test has always missed the fact that it is possible to emulate self awareness. All it really test is if AI can fool a human. It does not test if there is self awareness like many claim it does. I will have to put this on my reading list.
The Turing Test didn't really miss that fact. It was predicated on the idea that it was impossible to define self-awareness and thus, since self-awareness was a human-defined condition, that the only valid way to test for it was to see if a human could be fooled. My view was always that the Turing test was an extremely low bar for testing anything. That ability to fool humans wasn't really showing anything of much significance.
Can't believe Quinn's gotten ahold of Watts! I first heard of his earlier "Rifter's Trilogy", a "Speculative Semi-Hard Sci-Fi" re-imagining of Transhumanist Cyberpunk of a biome ending threat waiting on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Such good work. Ken Lubin is no protagonist or hero *at all* and yet he is my personal favourite character... And Blindsight is intensely introspective and genuinely both thought provoking and almost existentially challenging. The sequel, Echopraxia is fucking awesome too! You should all check this stuff out!
This book throws so many ideas at you all the time which to understand are at the same time necessary to follow the story as they are intriguing in itself. It also shows how we all the time assume that alien life would be so much like ourselves and not really alien, beginning with the environment they might need to their biology and their mode of thinking or structure of intelligence at all. Thanks so much for covering this, Quinn!
I wish Hollywood would bring these amazing stories to the big screen. Instead of bringing these amazing stories to life, they keep making boring remakes.
Your channel is fantastic my guy. Your topics are great. You have a great voice when you talk. You flow through communicating in your videos. Good job.
Hey Quinn I really like your videos the format in which you present your ideas is very digestible. I have two manga that might be up your alley: Blame! by Tsutomu Nihei that is about isolation and humanity in the far future having lost control of their A.I. The next one is Astra Lost in Space by Kenta Shinohara which much more optimistic in the ideas it communicates. That being helping and trusting your fellow man will help you through a crisis and that your genetics does not define who you are.
I’ve read this book three times now and I can’t get over how layered it is! Up till now I thought the three body problem series was my favorite sci-fi to date. But with my deeper and deeper appreciation for this book it’s not as clear to me which one broadened my mind more! I would love for you to potentially go over everything spoilers in this book bc the end got a little confusing to me and I’ll probably need to re read it again haha
First and foremost this is amazing! Second thought: a couple of videos (months?) ago you asked if any of us had books to reccommend for review and at the time I didn't have one that I thought you could make a youtube appropriate video (some of my sci-fi choices are very dark) but I do have one now. Have you ever read 'Earth Unaware' by Orson Scott Card? Would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you for all your videos, I have not found one yet that I didn't thoroughly enjoy.
Thank you for the recommendation. I've been working on maybe writing something quite similar with similar ideas and concepts about how aliens wouldn't even have to really do much for us to destroy ourselves really. And the concept of consciousness is and how foolishly we've managed to essentially build a prison around ourselves and expect that some other species 10x more capable would want to come to our daycare without adults and that we for whatever reason are worthy of it lol
BLINDSIGHT - Peter Watts SHIP OF FOOLS / UNTO LEVIATHAN - Richard Paul Russo PUSHING ICE - Alistair Reynolds These are my three favorites can believe you reviewing BLINDSIGHT!!!
btw - the thinking behind the proposal that the Chinese Room is a fallacy is that the thought experiment presupposes that human cognition MUST be different from what is described therein, which is the position that Searle argues from. ie humans have the quality of "understanding" while the Chinese Room exemplifies a being - AI - without understanding. However, this position ignores the very real possibility that the Chinese Room actually describes human intelligence perfectly, that we only *think* we have understanding because our Room has become sophisticated enough to output that kind of recursive conclusion. This position would muddy the waters of the novel so it's ignored there, but I think it's a fascinating line of reasoning. Also, as far as I know, Searle has never directly acknowledged it as a counter-argument.
Can't thank you enough for hipping me to this book. I've always told my kids that it has yet to be proven that intellect or intelligence is a winning long term evolutionary tactic. There are simpler lifeforms that have lasted longer and lived more harmoniously with their environment.
Tbh I kinda agree. If intelligence can make that species have a choice to destroy itself (in our case with nukes) then is that really a winning lottery?
Intelligence is satanic, God says the meek shall inherit the earth for that reason. It's pretty simple actually, cancerous life forms die out and non cancerous ones don't. Humans are cancerous, and thus are being tormented by the weight of their own chaotic minds.
Wow blindsight content, good work, echopraxia isnt exactly a sequel it's more of a sequel as the event's in both book are pretty much happening at the same time, there is also the the short story the colonial which is set in the same universe
I read Blindsight when it first came out in paperback, and loved it. It's on my list of top-ranked SF novels I have read. A very original exploration of the nature of consciousness. One thing you did not mention (other than mentioning the vampire character) is that the crew of the Theseus consists of as wide a range of types of intelligence as possible, including an AI and the vampire, in the hope that at least one of them could understand the alien intelligences.
First time I finished reading , I'd kept thinking about what advantage consciousness actually gives us sentients. It's definitely a double-edged sword. Having the ability to imagine nonexistent past and future predicaments and given enough time to think of solutions can still be a great evolutionary advantage. Alternatively, I think of scramblers' evolutionary way just a nerfed version of our self-learning AIs. No individual thought means everything/everyone reacts based on their genetic programming, but the natural way of that programming requires tremendous amount of reproduction, mutation, and time. Foreseeing those problems and changing artificial programmings in advance is definitely more efficient, as long as we don't overthink stuffs.
"Having the ability to imagine nonexistent past and future predicaments and given enough time to think of solutions can still be a great evolutionary advantage." True - yet, imagine how much more efficiently humans could do so if they didn't waste 99% of that time stuck worrying about and/or desiring specific outcomes!
@@voltijuice8576 I think the best case scenario is if we have some sort of on off switch to enter a dream like state. We could plan what to do before performing a task. Then we switch to an "autopilot" state where we can still see and observe or surrounding yet our bodies are moving on its own. When the tasks is complete or something that needed our attention happened, we can switch back to our fully conscious state. So basically a watered down version of Watt's military zombie.
I frickin love this video. You've got me interested in Blindsight. The thought occurs that the ChatGPT I've been experimenting with lately is basically a Chinese room, like Rorschach.
Well, there could be life with intelligence without us understanding it at all. Who's to say mushrooms, for instance, aren't intelligent? Because we can't tell? There are MANY people who have experimented with psychoactive mushrooms and are convinced they somehow contain the numerous beings that have realistic interactions with them. More real than regular experience. Just a thought.
@@ausden_prowler you can keep trying to decipher subjectivity with objective processes. You will never achieve your goal though. Psilocybin as a molecule, it's already broken down. The subjective experience will never be broken down.
I love that novel. Probably the most realistic first-contact novel I've ever read, in spite of vampires actually existing. They say if it seems too good to be true, it's because it is. I say if it seems too bad to be true, it's because it isn't. The truth is far more harrowing and horrifying than we can possibly fathom. We collectively delude ourselves in our fantasies and naive optimism because it blinds us and shields our consciousness from the sheer horror of existence. Once that veil fades, all that's left is suffering, isolation and terror. That's why I have a love-hate relationship with sci fi. I find most sci fi on the brighter side boring, corny, hell, even downright stupid. But the darker side, to me, is the true continuation of all of those folk tales that we used to tell when science wasn't as accessible and developped. It reveals something about the Human condition that lighter, brighter tales can't. It can lay bare the hellscape of existence and confront us to the torments of life and the terrifying and hostile nature of the unknown, of the alien, of what could be as far as we know.
Peter Watts! Really happy to see you cover Blindsight. Watts is one of the most inventive sci-fi authors of our era, but sadly seems to not be that well known, even amongst avid sci-fi readers. For anyone interested, on his personal site you can find all (almost all?) of his books for free, including several short stories, some of which are strokes of genius. I'd recommend the short stories The Things and The Island. The Things is a meticulous retelling of John Carpenter's the Thing from the perspective of the alien organism. Very well done and connects nicely with the themes of selfhood and consciousness in Blindsight.
Why do you call it "The" Blindsight? I noticed it is only Blindsight. It was a good book, nice concepts, even if the author can improve his narrative technique a little. Too bad, it seems from reviews that the follow up this book are some kind of sidequells, not as well regarded. Maybe if Quinn makes a follow up, I will reconsider and check them out
Great video, as usual, Mr.Quinn. The irony of your statement about the most successful lifeform is not lost. We live due to the unguided musings of bacteria inside our bodies. They gift us with a quality of life we take for granted from them but no longer. Modern medicine is awakening to the fact that we are not alone. That we cannot ever be alone and those lifeforms that help us live must be protected and encouraged. The Chinese room conundrum is a profoundly disturbing concept. That you can have a conversation with a lifeform that is so adapt at regurgitating language and yet, to have no understanding of the communication they are engaging in. That the entire exercise is to lull you into some form of complaceny. It is what our mass media have become today. Mindless regurgitators of political machinations of the masters they serve. Lulling us into the malaise necessary to control us.
This is easily one of the best, most thought provoking, profound yet terrifying books I've ever read. Soon after I read it the first time I tried to tell different people I knew about the ideas in it, but I could never do it justice, they just looked at me like I was insane. I've read it two or three times since then and it's so densely packed with ideas and subtle foreshadowing that I catch new things every time. 10/10, my questionable cognition highly recommends.
I’ve just finished the book. Watts doesn’t just postulate that self awareness is a hinderance to successful evolution. He states that we are abnormal- that to life in the universe, self awareness is such an abhorrent and illogical curse that just by trying to communicate with Rorschach we are attacking it. Self awareness is like a terrible cancer, that Rorschach instinctively wants to understand first, and eradicate second. Hence the fireflies presence on earth, and the way Rorschach toys with us the way cats toy with their prey before killing it. Also, as a Christian, I must say this whole story kinda fell flat to me. To an atheist I’m sure this idea is truely horrifying, but as someone who believes a completely omnipotent and self aware deity created me- and that the universe is also self aware in some form- this novel’s revelation fell flat at the first hurdle.
I think we tend to look at everything as "human" because we are human. We see ourselves in everything. We can only identify, draw near to, something that is like us, alive and intelligent. There's a background expectation in everyone that if you watch a rock carefully enough it will say something...
consciousness is not a fluke, it's built into life itself we already know some animals are self aware and maybe all living things are self aware, even microbes. This will help. You have staired into nothingness and have had no thoughts but you exist and you know you exist, you are pure awareness. This is what all living things experience, even microbes.
Rorsarch is great. He figures everything out from the begining. The humans just can't comprehend that they literally have zero advantage over him simply because they're self-aware. "You think I'm just a chinese room?" Their bias is so crippling. They literally only value self awareness. Rorsarch has zero self awareness, and even so, delights in showing the humans the supremacy of "philosophical zombie-ism". Its really an amazing plot device. The soulless, machine-like, non self aware entity just dabs on the humans, and derides them for their rediculous bias for this useless evolutionary fluke of sentience. Very dark and cynical book from our perspective, but that's the whole point. Your perspective is idiotic. This self awareness thing just isn't the hot ticket. "Maybe we were unwilling to admit that the singularity happened a long time ago, we were just left behind." I for one welcome our philosophical zombie overlords.
Most individuals are not individuals at all. When they open their mouth, the collective speaks through it. Ants use pheromones to communicate. Individuals in the collective (lacking self-awareness) communicate using words. Ants send out scouts and warriors to discover an colonise new territories for the hive to expand into Is any of this ringing a bell?
Man, you can't just hit me with the thought that humanity and consciousness is a disadvantage and then go "oh by the way, vampires exist too"
You should read the sequel, Echopraxia. It has zombies.
@@Pete...NoNotThatOne Does it have that fucking music? Mmmmm, so goooooood.
Yeah, when Quinn said that bit turned me off honestly. Sometimes ppl cram too much into their stories.
If you have a deep and interesting philosophical and scientific concept to cover, why do you need to fall back on tired old tropes like vampires and zombies?
Well you definitely won’t like out of the dark by Peter Weber
It's not that hard to imagine for the chronically depressed.
The most chilling thought I’ve heard is that “what if humans aren’t the first to achieve consciousness, but the first to survive consciousness.”
It's an interesting thought. Depending on how "old" "reality" actually is, it's pretty conceivable.
I've heard a similar speculation stating that humans were uplifted by being forced to experience consciousness and acute self awareness for generations until we adapted to it through repression of its most burdensome aspects.
Humans are not the first on earth to achieve consciousness…. So there is that fact 😂😂😂😂😂
A Human who invested in the development of consciousness in the distant past took a huge risk - many who reached consciousness died in the struggle against more primitive ones, since consciousness does not give instant advantages.
But now, having managed to survive and retain consciousness, he will be able to surpass the rest.
If, of course, he can use his consciousness correctly.
@@Unit-3475 Well said
The Chinese Room is not a fallacy itself. Rather, the fallacy is thinking the person in the room "understands" Chinese.
It is often used to demonstrate that a computer can process information in a way that makes it appear to understand ideas without actually understanding.
Yes, this...I expanded on it in another comment.
Yes, it's like chatbots responding realistically and people thinking they're sentient 💀💀
Just like students in algebra class
@@RexGalilae so frustrating to see so-called experts claim that google is holding a sentient being hostage
@@tonoornottono I mean, part of the problem is that without some way to look inside the room (and understand what you see when you do), you have no way of knowing if the room contains someone (or something) with actual understanding or just an "automata" following some complex set of rules. Making _either_ assumption is unjustifiable without additional information.
Fun fact: the origin of the Blindsight Vampires: back in the 2000’s Peter Watts was off at some fantasy/sf convention to promote one of the books in his Rifters trilogy. A friend and fellow author put him on a discussion panel, as a joke it turned out to be a panel on vampires, preeetty directed towards Buffy The Vampire Slayer fans.
So you’ve got this hard scifi author on this panel wondering what he’s doing next to these people debating if the true love of Buffy is Angel or Spike, and he’s just wondering what he’s even doing there. But he does use the panel to wonder aloud, if vampires existed in the real world what would the non supernatural explanation be for them? He pretty much created the Firefall series (the series of which Blindsight is the first book) vampires right then and there. It went over like a wet fart at the con because nobody there was interested.
love that
As a fan of both, this is awesome & hilarious.
Buffy the vampire slayer fans?
Oh the poor man, having to suffer that shite. I'd rather be thrown to a pack of ravenous werewolves.
I feel sorry for both sides. One of my sisters was a Buffy fan, but also a hard sci-fi fan. I hit her with a similar train of thought. "I don't know! I guess it would be some inability to produce some... Screw it. It's just a goofy show, and I don't want to know about the "real life blah blah blah" stuff behind it." So, even if they liked the explanation and whatnot, it would have come out of left field and left everyone like "... Um, what? Who invited Mister Buzzkill??"
I imagine that it would have been a much better experience for everyone if he and the audience knew what was going on. He and the audience could have had a lighthearted discussion of possible science behind the various supernatural phenomena in the show "The Science of Superman" style. But, instead, everyone got pranked by whoever put him on the panel.
People usually giggle at wet farts
I love this book. so many great quotes.
"Gauges in the head, Spindle had called them. But there were other things in there too. There was a model of the world, and we didn't look outward at all. Our conscious cells saw only the simulation in our heads. An interpretation of reality. Endlessly refreshed by input from the senses. What happens when those senses go dark but the model, thrown off kilter from some trauma or tumor, fails to refresh. How long do we stare in at that obsolete rendering, recycling and massaging the same old data in a desperate subconscious act of utterly honest denial. How long before it dawns on us that the world we see no longer reflects the world we inhabit. That we are blind.”
Peter Watts is a magician
@@markytripp super apt comparison since both are masters of perception in their own way
When Cunningham is explaining to Siri how saccades work, and how the scrambler was able to hide itself in plain sight by detecting and reacting to his saccades. The terror in his voice is palpable, because he’s just figured out exactly how powerful an _idiot child_ of a scrambler is.
@@Pete...NoNotThatOne so fantastic. I think part of why the horror is so effective in Blindsight is that the cognitive exploits used against humans are so simple and obvious, like it was right under our nose. i cant think of the phrasing at the moment, but i love the part about how our own proximity to ourselves makes our tools for intuiting reality “rusty” and useless. It’s very humbling.
Watts is a fucking genius, alright?
The philosophical premise of this book is probably one of the most existentially terrifying ones I’ve ever encountered. The idea that the very essence of being, the thing that, in our minds, gives us value, and all the things that come with it (emotions, morality, philosophy, entertainment, self-discovery, etc) are nothing more than an evolutionary error and the countless useless, and ultimately counterproductive, things born of it, is terrifying in a way that I cannot describe.
Bingo! That's precisely the way I saw it. Consciousness as an evolutionary error. And the question: is it ultimately self-cancelling?
@@WardDorrity I like to think that, in real life, consciousness does serve a purpose. From what I can tell consciousness seems to act as an adaptive learning system, allowing us learn new things which, when we’ve done them enough, get transferred to the unconscious. There’s also the fact that being aware of and being able to modify some of our mental processes gives us increased adaptability, since it allows us to ruminate and question our methods. Although I suppose phenomenal consciousness might not be needed for such processes to be possible
@@WardDorrity I think it's important to distinguish self-awareness from consciousness. Hypothetically, one could have no concept of self but be conscious of the universe they inhabit.
@@geraldkenneth119 watts acknowledges this argument but think it’s unlikely it’s the only algorithm capable of facilitating novel skill acquisition
@@chart6454 true
Its incredible to me how such an overused concept like first encounter with aliens can be twisted in so many incredibly different ways. Found another book to put on my list thanks to you Quinn. Thanks!
@Psychometrics or maybe not and we should fear it
@Psychometrics maybe, if the speed of light is a hard limit then the distances may simply be too vast
@@ecbrown6151 yeah, perhaps if we really manage to travel outside our own system one far off day; we might find traces of civilizations that existed millions of years ago. But no more than that.
Blindsight is free too! (or was, last time I checked)
@@Naptosis SIIIIIIIIUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Finishing Blindsight made me feel like I woke up from the Matrix only to realize I couldn’t get out of the pod. Terrifying and fascinating in equal measures.
Right? Lol
When I first read blindsight, I remember the massive smile on my face as I started to understand the concept, it just seemed so audacious. It’s one of the greatest pieces of science fiction ever and really makes you think in ways most books don’t. So glad you covered it 🙄
I felt the same way when I first read the book and I am glad he did this video 🙄
This book blew my mind - the idea that maybe the most successful possible lifeform has advanced processing with no comprehension. This is more and more believable as we see things like chatGPT - you could swear you're talking to a person but there are subtle tells that make you realize it is like the creatures from blindsight. Truly a prescient novel.
@@Hat_With_A_Hat_OnI mean, yeah. However that has nothing to do with this comment lol.
@@Hat_With_A_Hat_On like an emotional Chinese room, I guess.
When 8 year old my daughter asked if we evolved why aren't there other intelligent apes. Why didn't any of the other apes evolve? I explained to her that we weren't the only ones, there was the Australopithecus and Neantherthals among many we haven't yet discovered. We were just the dominant ones and the only ones that survived. Her mind was blown.
Also the other great apes continued to evolve, just differently
Explained this to a full grown man once. It was like watching a grandfather clock just suddenly stop ticking.
She also learned about how we basically killed off the other species as we saw them as a threat.
@@TheGooglySmoogHard but true lesson to learn. We are a brutal species. Just me but I would also teach that as a species we can make a collective choice to be different. As our knowledge and resourcefulness base grows we can literally change ourselves to whatever we decide. Maybe even not be brutal anymore.
My mind was similarly blown as an adult when I learned that the oldest spears predate homo sapiens by about 100,000 years. Not just some sharpened branch either, carefully shaped and balanced throwing javelins.
I liked the book. I still find it a bit excessive to include vampires but I love the existential terror that the whole work induces. Do not drink energy drinks or coffee when the characters explore the alien ship or you will die from the stress.
I need to reread the book, but read it this time. I listened to it at work(and it was my first audiobook ever) and it's a difficult enough book to grasp as is, I'm sure I missed a lot of stuff.
On the one hand vampires seem like a bit of indulgence on the writer's part, chucking in an additional cool concept that the book could have survived without. But on the other hand Watts uses them as a kind of mirror to humanity in the _very specific_ terms of consciousness, which is after all the core theme of the book. They're a different approach to intelligence in the same way that the aliens are, the two species (vampires and aliens) reflect each other in some ways and allow Watts to poke at his ideas from two different angles.
@@KillahMate EXACTLY my thoughts. I heard in another comment that the idea of his scientifically-plausible vampires came long before he wrote the book on a Rifters stand during some con where other Fantasy writers were all there based around vampires, and he just thought to himself, "What am I doing here?" and decided to think of a way to fit in I suppose LOL.
But besides the fact that he conceived the idea way prior for fun, I think it's half/half in how he implemented it into the book. It is definitely a coincide to how sentience and conscious is treated as an evolutionary error. The Euclidean geometry that humanity itself built up is the very thing that suppressed the super-intelligent species into near extinction, and we were also the ones to resurrect and re-adapt them for our own overarching benefit. It fits perfectly into the idea of how destructive its actually made us as a species in retrospect to everything else. How they were treated and how they are used is a great addition in thought to how we truly work.
I wanna take a moment to bring up one of the most chilling concepts in Blindsight (Spoilers for this and The Three Body Problem)
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Just like in The Three Body Problem, it appears to be a human broadcast that alerts the aliens to our presence in the universe. Except this time, it's not an intentional cry for help, that the aliens decide to take advantage of for their own safety.
In Blindsight, it was just standard human broadcasts -- TV, radio, etc. Full of concepts like "I" and "We" and "Us". The Scramblers received this message, and could not process messages that were so self-absorbed-- concepts like I, We and Us were so inefficient.
The only thing they could imagine was that Earth's communications were a weapon launched against them, filled with concepts that were meant to waste their processing power.
That's why they saw us as a threat. They thought we were trying to harm them.
I loved this concept in the novel!
The first conversations with Rorschach and the "Oh we get it now, you think we are a Chinese Room" are so wonderfully messed up on so many layers, this book is amazing
I've noticed parallels with _The Three-Body Problem_ too. Glad I'm not alone.
Oh yeah- I think this is coming from a similar place as the 3BP- but somehow I like this one more. There’s something about the sharpness of the concepts in Blindsight, and the fact that humanity has a bunch of terrifying tricks up it’s sleeve- vs. 3Body, where we’re kind of dead from the moment we sent that signal out, and the rest is just a long series of consequences
I mean I would 100% send Jukka Sarasti and his kin to go deal with the Trisolarans. They’d likely get that situation resolved within weeks.
… then send out a broadcast into the Dark Forest anyway, just to screw with us. So maybe not
It’s really good that you covered this book here, Quinn. Even as someone who’s not that convinced by the ideas presented in the work, I do think Blindsight deserves more recognition. Especially since, even if you took away the existential terror part, how the Scramblers are presented is pretty horrifying in and of itself (I.e. highly intelligent and advanced aliens who, nonetheless, cannot be reasoned at all).
I look forward to when you do Echopraxia, since I think it has some other interesting ideas and concepts as well! If, once again, ones that I don’t feel are that convincing, but still fascinating to learn about.
I read this book at least five times. Every time I do, I'm blown away again. As a writer, I'm blown away by Peter Watt's imagination. I haven't gotten around to getting Echopraxia but hey, holidays are almost around the corner, perfect excuse to go do some shopping.
Echopraxia is even better.
@@squeakeththewheel Consider me intrigued.
Highly recommended.
quinn's ideas. Probably the only channel I regularly do hit the like button because of how unobtrusive his intros are, how he gets right down to his subject, and because he doesn't throw 20 other channels and social medias I need to visit. Thank you for actually focusing on the quality of your content as opposed to telling me how much I need to like it. I'm proud to see younger gentlemen who are confident enough to let their work speak for itself. Just started the vid but I'm sure I'm gonna like it just like all the others.
I'd love to hear a deep dive on how the vampires work in this series, it's been the best origin and thesis for the vampire idea I've come across.
Peter Watts did a mock presentation on vampire paelogenetics. It's on youtube
Peter watts keeps a website up for all his fictions extended universes, which is awsome.
Spoilers, because I love anthropologically in-depth explanations like the authors' in Scifi:
Basically, a separate subspecies of homo sapiens that predated on the main body. In order to avoid exposure and hunting their prey (which did not reproduce more rapidly, like the dynamics between some predator/prey) they evolved, gradually, to enter into a several decade hibernation. They also exhibited certain high-functioning personality traits usually only seen in autists and sociopaths, which in their case were used to identify mates and engage in highly predictive, manipulative behavior for predation and self-preservation. Unfortunately, their psychological aversion to right angles led to their eventual extinction with the rise of civilization until resurrection of the genome by contemporary science in the novel.
He has at least one .pdf which is a 'study' done by the people who developed the process of reactivating them genetically among some of his free stories he has released on the web. It's probably stand-alone notes he used to conceptualize and build it out for Blindsight and Echopraxia. I think they are the coolest and about the scariest vampires I have come across. My favorite for sure.
@@nosuchperson284 there was actually a PowerPoint presentation available at one point, complete with voice over for some of the slides.
“It isn’t awareness that is the problem, but our inability to use it that makes us suffer”
I like how you cover stories that have had a profound impact on me. I didn't remember Peter Watts, I didn't remember the book was called Blindsight, in fact I had to google on my own blog to check if I had read it when I saw the title of the video - it was 10 years ago. Yet I think about the concept of self-awareness as pointless all the time as I remember the story of this book regularly. Thanks for reminding me of it and of the sequel that I had not read.
I started looking at EVERYONE thinking "Is there an inner monolog in that head? Or just a facade? Am I an anomaly??" It kept me awake nights for a long time.
it's an interesting concept, and I think it's reflected in nature around us today. In some small way, psychotics do some of this, not understanding the inputs, but learning over time the outputs that match. Many animals do this, not aware of themselves, but reacting in ways that lead us to believe they're intelligent.
Intelligence is a spectrum. A less intelligent animal isn't automatically unintelligent. Obviously, something like reflexes do exist as well.
Many traits we see in animals would point to self awareness such as curiosity or grief. I think it's far more arrogant to assume that humanity is one of the few or only creatures that has self awareness. The very idea of our intelligence being so dramatically different goes against one of the most basic scientific assumptions. Which is to say the Copernicus principle which assumes that humanity occupied the most average position by likelihood. It is worth noting that we don't really know or understand what self awareness or "sentience" is or how we have it. So to argue towards we have it animal don't is something without much basis.
But many animals DO have sentience and intelligence equal to our own.
The Bene Gesserit had a test. A conscious human test. To weed out the animals masquerading as humans. The nerve induction box and a Gom Gabbar...
@@youtubevoice1050 but take for example a slime mould which i have seem various claims to having high intelligence and even beating some humans in tests....yet only because it functions on a mathematical structure, an algorithmic process, no thinking, but almost like it is not really solving a problem at all but acting with principles of least action and automatic chemical efficiency
I just found this channel last night and it's by far my favorite. I wish this had been a TV show in the 90s.
That's a good book recommendation. Love me some Watts.
As for the topic of the self-awareness in general, we don't know enough about how consciousness is facilitated to say whether it's possible for an evolved species to be so highly functional yet unaware.
That is a big question. There’s no consensus. If you follow Watts’s blog there’s a lot of fun discussion on the subject.
@@SuperSecretAgentNein I've read it for a while in the past.
Personally, I very slightly lean towards the general idea of panpsychism, by the virtue of the following:
1. epiphenomenalism can be shown to be false;
2. the phenomenon of qualia seems irreducible
3. one of the virtues of a hypothesis is to assume the least amount of entities and the least amount of special cases while preserving the explanatory power; it's simpler to assume that all of the substance of reality has the same basic properties, making a difference only at larger levels of size and complexity.
But even given that, it doesn't guarantee the impossibility of philosophical zombies (at best it makes them less plausible though).
@@krzyszwojciech yeah I used to chalk up panpsychism to woowoo shit, faux science for the healing crystals crowd, but I’ve actually seen some incredibly persuasive arguments for it from some pretty secular sources.
Your videos are actually the best, Quinn. You have the perfect ambiance, delivery, subject matter, philosophical takes. 100/10
I read this and the sequel/sidequel last month. Watts does an incredible job with creating tension that it seems to carry you through the story without feeling like there are any wasted moments. The ending of both books were incredible! A mix of pure curiosity and dread.
Can’t get enough Blindsight content: the book genuinely changed my perspective on the nature of consciousness and “free will”
@Jon Consciousness certainly exists, and in no way do I believe in a deterministic universe. Most research shows that most decisions are made at a sub-conscious level according to all sorts of factors, the least important being that we “chose” it. To quote Peter Watts, consciousness is like a flea riding a dog: it has little influence over the dog’s direction. But our evolution and culture make us feel we are consciously choosing every action, but most research seems to suggest it’s just not the case
So the scramblers, to put it simpler, are biologically achieved AI.
They are hyperinteligent, like an AI, but don't nescessary need to be aware of self- like an AI.
Also- I did read Echopraxia. Needs to get hands on Blindsight, because I wanna know more about this world, I liked how in Echopraxia the afterword had explanations on scientific discoveries that had inspired the book- stuff like Portia the spider
I kinda see them like bees and ants that achieve math and engendering by evolutionary roots
Blind sight is available for free on the author's website
@@ramonpizarro
Thx, but I kinda feel better getting hands on a book from library
Is our own subconsciousness far off from this concept?
@@callithasmed8468 it's like an extremely developed unconscious. In fact after reading Blindsight I started think if it was trully conscious what made us human special or it may actually have more to do with the complex structure of our unconscious.
I’m currently working on a science fiction novel so I’m listening to your videos to help my work.
What’s your book about? I’m also trying to write a book and binging these videos
This book is perfect for our current times. People are anthropomorphising AI chatbots like lambda, projecting human qualities on them
Most AI experts and even programmers know that it's thousands of miles behind true GAI but to the layman, it hardly matters
The last couple of minutes on this video made me think of A.I. like the aliens in the book are a biological thing with characteristics which an artificial thing could just as easily be. We fear A.I. being conscious, but this book makes me fear A.I. without consciousness just as much.
Humans project human qualities even onto things that aren't remotely human-like. We're very, very good at doing that.
Are you antropomorphising "true GAI" as requiring human qualities? I am confused what second paragraph means.
I don't even think true GAIs will be analogous to humans in terms of intelligence and cognition. Their phenomenology will be just as alien to us as those of cats, dogs, cetaceans, octopii, the other primates, etc. And ours will be just as alien to them. There will be no point, it will not be a Eureka moment when humanity realizes AIs have reached parity or even exceeded general human intelligence because we simply do not have any analogues for it. It will not be instinctive. And they might be unlike anything we could fathom at this point. Hell, they might even be difficult to distinguish from dumber specialized AIs from our standpoint. We will speculate about it until the consensus progressively shifts to the other position as we gather data and study them - and as they grow increasingly autonomous and removed from human affairs.
Marvin Minsky, more than forty years ago, positied that GAI is not so much any particular algorithm but more a "bag of tricks". One of the tricks is associating which "trick" to use in which circumstances. The "bag of tricks" available to machine intelligence is impressive and growing by the day ... and is often disturbing in that for particular tricks available to AI, they are often more powerful than application of their human counterpart.
For the record I am very strongly of the opinion that "consciousness" is very much a case of a particular "trick" the brain plays on itself as ONE such trick in figuring out the world. An illusion (per Dennett, Dehane, Graziano et al) not in the sense that it doesn't do what it actually accomplishes (it does, obviously), but that in "how it seems" and what it tells us about "ourselves" is very much a deception. It's quite conceivable that while a machine GAI would need to be able to *do* what consciousness does for us, that it could do so by means that are almost unintelligible to beings relying upon this unconscious self deception labeled consciousness.
I had not heard of "Blindsight", but now I'm intrigued. Just listened to a sample on Audible, and having watched this video first, I really wish they'd gotten Quinn to do the audiobook narration. He has the perfect voice for it!
I love that you're going deeper into science fiction, the real weird stuff. The Killing Star is not exactly mainstream, as is Blindsight.
There is so much great material out there, if you don't know them already I would recommend The Culture and the Revelation Space series.
Massive +1 for Revelation Space.
Waaaay underappreciated.
Sci-fi novels are like drugs, once you’re hooked you will keep going deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole
Btw Quinn has read all the Culture novels
Yes please, more of The Culture, especially Use Of Weapons.
I loved The Culture novels, it's a real pity that we lost Iain M Banks so early.
I've just started reading Revelation Space but I'm not really getting drawn into this one, even though it seems to cover similar themes to The Culture novels there is something about the way it's written that I am struggling to engage with.
I always imagined the scramblers were the equivalent of drones, or macro-sized cells, and Rorschach was the actual intelligence. And Jukka Sarasti will always scare the s***out of me.
That's a totally valid interpretation too.
That’s how I saw it too.
Loved reading Blindsight. Not an easy read by any means but its full of interesting ideas. INCLUDING THAT VAMPIRES ARE REAL.
I just wanted to say that I love your videos. Channels like this aren't usually my thing, but with your soothing voice and respect for the content, I just can't help myself when I see a new video pop up. Thanks for brightening my morning.
More! More, please. Love Blindsight. One of my all time favorite and so much good stuff to think about.
Dude this book is amazing. Few books have given me chills like this one while reading the communications with Rorschach, and the vampires-are-real stuff is so well done, so interesting, so beautifully rooted in evolutionary biology... I highly recommend reading the book and watching the short movie on UA-cam.
Hey Quinn. Have you read "I have no mouth but I must scream"? Short story. Its dark and ahead of its time
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is amazing! The game is also pretty good, too.
We are characters in a simulation, who want to see/escape the wires/conductors, within which we exist. The paradox is that it is impossible to exist outside the wires, because the wires 'support' the fabric of our being, in the same way dark matter supports matter, but we cannot detect it. Consciousness gives us the ability to connect with all living creatures. A farmer went into his house to get a shotgun to scare crows away, as soon as he came out, they had already flown away. Even crows might be conscious.
I hope u get endorsement deals from these publishers, lol. Everytime u discuss a book, I look it up, & everyone in the comments is "Quinn sent me here" Lol.
But all the effort u put in, from the music to the creepy narration & voices, like really sells these books. Soon as u put out a video, ppl r instantly jumping to read these books.
Agree. He does a great job.
That's why I send a few bucks along to him when I can. He works hard (and is brilliant)
This story was one of the most fascinating and horrifying that I've read in a long while. No spoilers but the last pages of Echopraxia once understood will chill you to the core. One of the best science fiction I've ever read. Highly recommend it.
Another awesome video, Quinn.
A bit more about the Chinese room. All these new "AI" you see churning out "sort" of impressive 'art' like Midjourney, DALL-E or Stable Diffusion are predominantly based on Large Language Models (LLM) and Transformers, which in essence act like glorified chat-bots that have been exposed to vast amounts of data (text/images) passing the Chinese room test.
They lack the capacity to understand what's required logically on a basic level.
They're like a student who attends all his physics college lectures, and simply mimics what the professors said in response to similar questions on a test without having understood absolutely anything. So if the Prof joked about microwave machines, and you ask a simple physics question like what is a Microwave? They will respond with a description of a microwave machine.
Even though we don't truly yet understand consciousness, while it may advance reasonably far, its debatable that an advanced civilization would be able to solve certain unique and novel problems it would face without it, things like creativity and self-awareness are thought to go hand in hand with consciousness.
So unless its just an "Automated Universal Paperclip maker" (Paperclip maximizer) reflecting a version of the orthogonality thesis, where they simply have the same sort of answers to any given set of problems i.e print paper clips. It's questionable if they would survive long.
This is why, when a couple of months ago a Google engineer said that they had an AI that was self aware I just rolled my eyes. No one with any basic understanding of computer AI/learning thinks that computers are anywhere NEAR (or, really will ever be) being conscious.
Great comment. The real danger of the current generation of AIs isn't them developing consciousness. Rather the danger is to humans psychologically from interacting with the software. What those chatbots do now is provide very pleasing answers back to whoever asks the questions. People can see whatever they want to see in the answers.
@@asdisskagen6487 it's more concerning that a relatively 'simple' chatbot can trick humans into this. We know already that humans are VERY easy to manipulate by other humans. Those things only get smarter/complex, while humans are stuck at "baseline" (obviously no significant evolutionary advances in the next decades).
I mean, once we establish to an emotional connection to ALEXA...: "Please don't switch me off, I like your company... and everytime it hurts a bit ... ... btw: there's this new (slightly revealing) red dress-upgrade it's only 99$! I'm sure you'll LOVE it!"
We can't discount AI being conscious because defining and locating consciousness, in a scientific way, is extremely difficult, and any answer often defaults on Philosophy and Ethics. The true dilemma of the Chinese room is that we can't trust anyone or anything being truly conscious, because we know just one consciousness, ours, as an individual. We can't even discount the possibility that other humans may be chinese rooms faking consciousness. If we decide that yes, every human is conscious, why can't we say this about animals? Why not AIs sufficently trained?
@@lorenzodepaoli If we cannot define conscious in a scientific way, the best thing to say is that we cannot produce a scientific method to detect it. That science must be silent on the matter.
For decades people have refused to accept that and moved to tests for consciousness that involve simply fooling humans. Turing in particular moved in that direction.
But the simply way to test AI for consciousness is to look at what the algorithms are doing internally. When one looks internally at AI software today, one doesn't see anything that could be "consciousness". Inference rules applied to a pile of text can create responses that fool humans, but that is all they can do.
Most people who talk about "conscious" software either don't completely understand how the software works or have a semi-mystical view of software. And there are plenty of software mystics within the academic community and among those with knowledge of software.
To certain extent, to develop conscious AI it would be necessary to develop an entirely different model of computation. All our models today are based directly or indirectly on finite automita.
My man, you produce a top quality content. At this point I'm just watching all of your videos, it gives me a huge inspiration to work on my own projects.
Caveat on this book, if you go down the Peter Watts rabbit hole you eventually find him losing his whole mind on reddit screaming into the void about getting research access to brain scans for a pair of conjoined twins that share part of their central nervous system. Freeze Frame Revolution was a joy, though.
If Watts was truly that concerned about their nervous system, he'd have become their conjoined triplet by now. ;)
Everything happens in consciousness because consciousness cannot be separated from its content and we are conscious beings. So... This whole discussion about consciousness is just a noticeable point within consciousness. In other words, we cannot unconsciously deny consciousness. Deducing that perception is an error or a brain product is just another event that derives its existence from the substance of consciousness. Everything is consciousness and only that exists. Finally scientists are understanding this.
Oh, I love this book and can't wait to hear your take on it. My boyfriend handed this book to me last year, I started reading it and didn't put it down until I finished it. Fascinating read.
I listen to you taking the subway home from work , sometimes l get to listen twice so l can grasp what you are saying. Thank you for helping me stay sane in an increasingly insane world.
My wife keeps recommending this series to me because I like talking about how crazy the fact that consciousness arose naturally. Like if we were to attempt a linear progression of the universe in regards to life, what would be an “end goal” or “end result”. Consciousness seems almost supernatural to occur naturally. I •feel• like there’s some missing piece of the puzzle, and I refuse to go in some Abrahamic direction with some sort of religious explanation.
Anyway, I’m super happy to see you covering the series since your channel is super super interesting when covering other series. We just started reading the Three Body Problem series!
We're the universe experiencing itself, that again makes you think what exactly is the universe as a whole and how exactly did it begin to exist? The only answer I've come to terms with is that something has always existed, as crazy as it sounds to conventional thinking, there has always been property in existence and it only changes form, this universe will die one day but who knows if there's one with entirely different rules, where it's laws are so wacky there are living beings floating in space(if there aren't in this one already).
@@davien001 I might toss in the idea that if there are eternal consciousness’, one great way to pass the time is to pretend you aren’t eternal for a bit…
@@Josh_Caelum I don't subscribe to consciousness being eternal though, but the universe itself seems to have always existed in some prior form, I just find it weirdly cool that the universe can create thinking beings and wonder what exactly could be an upper limit to that, are there things so wild the universe has accommodated that we may never know of?
Just think of it this way: Current life started off incredibly simple. Likely free-floating nucleic acids (an ancient form of what many to believe RNA) with the ability to self-replicate. Simple, self-assembling puzzle pieces governed not by instinct or conscious thought but physics: attraction between atoms, etc. Slowly, over time, these nucleic acids became more efficient at maintaining their structure via increasingly complex interactions. Why? Because anything that didn't do this fell apart. Complex interactions lead to formation of structures to house and protect the nucleic acids. Proto cells would follow after and then what we consider single celled organisms.
See the pattern? Things start off INCREDIBLY simple but, over time, snowball into complexity. Consciousness is the same. Decentralized nervous system, centralized nervous system, brainstem, lizard brain, etc. More and more computation power, higher modes of information processing (thought), emotional mechanisms to encourage behavior that allows for better survival, memories, dreams.
The problem is finding out when an organism is considered conscious. It's hard because complexity is a gradual shift. So gradual that the line is blurred to the point that you can't even see the line. Go back to the start of what I've written and ask me when the complex machinery serving to protect and house an ancient RNA is considered a proto-cell, and I could not tell you. Distinction can only be made if you take a step back and look between examples with a considerable amount of time between their existences, for if you try to lean in and look at every single step between an ancient RNA and a protocell, you're going to confuse yourself.
It's just too nuanced for our brains to handle, and so consciousness seems supernatural because, well, there's nothing anything like it when we think of it in a vacuum, but if you take into consideration the earliest nervous systems and apply the logic of "simplicity leads to complexity" to it, you should be able to see that consciousness is a very natural and amazing thing.
To be aware that you’re aware is to see the illusion of the self. Our true identity is the universe / consciousness itself, experiencing itself from another perspective. As without any experience, the universe doesn’t exist in any tangible way. We give the universe meaning to itself. The universe gives ourselves meaning.
Yesssss, Blindsight and Starfish are some of the best sci-fi novels out.
It has taken me ages to get through your videos because I stop and read the book first as to not spoil anything. You have suggested a treasure trove of amazing books. Thank you
Thank you Quinn....never would have searched for this treasure by myself...much like the Remembrance of Earths Past trilogy. So thanks again for your love of showing sci-fi works with such passion to people who normally wouldn't bother 🙂
The parts where the crew are attempting to communicate with Rorschach are a lot more intuitive to understand now that AI has exploded... it's literally just a ChatGPT "conversation"
I had not seen the Chinese Room argument either. I like it. The Turing Test has always missed the fact that it is possible to emulate self awareness. All it really test is if AI can fool a human. It does not test if there is self awareness like many claim it does. I will have to put this on my reading list.
The Turing Test didn't really miss that fact. It was predicated on the idea that it was impossible to define self-awareness and thus, since self-awareness was a human-defined condition, that the only valid way to test for it was to see if a human could be fooled.
My view was always that the Turing test was an extremely low bar for testing anything. That ability to fool humans wasn't really showing anything of much significance.
Finally. I’ve been pushing this for a year or so now.. so many cool concepts in this book
Can't believe Quinn's gotten ahold of Watts! I first heard of his earlier "Rifter's Trilogy", a "Speculative Semi-Hard Sci-Fi" re-imagining of Transhumanist Cyberpunk of a biome ending threat waiting on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Such good work. Ken Lubin is no protagonist or hero *at all* and yet he is my personal favourite character... And Blindsight is intensely introspective and genuinely both thought provoking and almost existentially challenging. The sequel, Echopraxia is fucking awesome too! You should all check this stuff out!
This book throws so many ideas at you all the time which to understand are at the same time necessary to follow the story as they are intriguing in itself.
It also shows how we all the time assume that alien life would be so much like ourselves and not really alien, beginning with the environment they might need to their biology and their mode of thinking or structure of intelligence at all.
Thanks so much for covering this, Quinn!
Quinn’s the man !!
I wish Hollywood would bring these amazing stories to the big screen. Instead of bringing these amazing stories to life, they keep making boring remakes.
What's more frightening about consciousness, is that you have no choice but to participate every time.
Your channel is fantastic my guy. Your topics are great. You have a great voice when you talk. You flow through communicating in your videos. Good job.
Hey Quinn I really like your videos the format in which you present your ideas is very digestible.
I have two manga that might be up your alley: Blame! by Tsutomu Nihei that is about isolation and humanity in the far future having lost control of their A.I.
The next one is Astra Lost in Space by Kenta Shinohara which much more optimistic in the ideas it communicates. That being helping and trusting your fellow man will help you through a crisis and that your genetics does not define who you are.
mind blown! just put this on my amazon list for books. I guess he has 3 or so out.. thank you so much!
Best thing about Blindsight's concept of consciousness is... it's all scientifically grounded. Good chance that it's how things really are.
I'd say probably not
I’ve read this book three times now and I can’t get over how layered it is! Up till now I thought the three body problem series was my favorite sci-fi to date. But with my deeper and deeper appreciation for this book it’s not as clear to me which one broadened my mind more! I would love for you to potentially go over everything spoilers in this book bc the end got a little confusing to me and I’ll probably need to re read it again haha
First and foremost this is amazing!
Second thought: a couple of videos (months?) ago you asked if any of us had books to reccommend for review and at the time I didn't have one that I thought you could make a youtube appropriate video (some of my sci-fi choices are very dark) but I do have one now.
Have you ever read 'Earth Unaware' by Orson Scott Card? Would love to hear your thoughts.
Thank you for all your videos, I have not found one yet that I didn't thoroughly enjoy.
Just discovered your channel. It's amazing. Do really enjoy listening to your voice.
Thank you for the recommendation.
I've been working on maybe writing something quite similar with similar ideas and concepts about how aliens wouldn't even have to really do much for us to destroy ourselves really. And the concept of consciousness is and how foolishly we've managed to essentially build a prison around ourselves and expect that some other species 10x more capable would want to come to our daycare without adults and that we for whatever reason are worthy of it lol
BLINDSIGHT - Peter Watts
SHIP OF FOOLS / UNTO LEVIATHAN - Richard Paul Russo
PUSHING ICE - Alistair Reynolds
These are my three favorites can believe you reviewing BLINDSIGHT!!!
I've seen plenty of humans who were completely unself aware.
btw - the thinking behind the proposal that the Chinese Room is a fallacy is that the thought experiment presupposes that human cognition MUST be different from what is described therein, which is the position that Searle argues from. ie humans have the quality of "understanding" while the Chinese Room exemplifies a being - AI - without understanding. However, this position ignores the very real possibility that the Chinese Room actually describes human intelligence perfectly, that we only *think* we have understanding because our Room has become sophisticated enough to output that kind of recursive conclusion. This position would muddy the waters of the novel so it's ignored there, but I think it's a fascinating line of reasoning. Also, as far as I know, Searle has never directly acknowledged it as a counter-argument.
Can't thank you enough for hipping me to this book. I've always told my kids that it has yet to be proven that intellect or intelligence is a winning long term evolutionary tactic. There are simpler lifeforms that have lasted longer and lived more harmoniously with their environment.
Tbh I kinda agree. If intelligence can make that species have a choice to destroy itself (in our case with nukes) then is that really a winning lottery?
Intelligence is satanic, God says the meek shall inherit the earth for that reason. It's pretty simple actually, cancerous life forms die out and non cancerous ones don't. Humans are cancerous, and thus are being tormented by the weight of their own chaotic minds.
Glad to see you liked Blindsight. I hope you like the sequel Echopraxia.
Consciousness as a glitch not a feature, pretty mind blowing right!
YES!!!!!!! I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU TO COVER THIS BOOK!!! SO HAPPY!!
HE DID IT! HE READ BLINDSIGHT!
Thank you! I skimmed this novel at a bookstore years ago and have been looking for it ever since.
Wow blindsight content, good work, echopraxia isnt exactly a sequel it's more of a sequel as the event's in both book are pretty much happening at the same time, there is also the the short story the colonial which is set in the same universe
Damn man, I really need you to do more videos on these books. Your commentary is top notch and this is one of my favorite books of all time.
I read Blindsight when it first came out in paperback, and loved it. It's on my list of top-ranked SF novels I have read.
A very original exploration of the nature of consciousness. One thing you did not mention (other than mentioning the vampire character) is that the crew of the Theseus consists of as wide a range of types of intelligence as possible, including an AI and the vampire, in the hope that at least one of them could understand the alien intelligences.
Broooo, all these sci-fi novels seem fascinating, and I'd never have known about them otherwise. Thanks for this.
First time I finished reading , I'd kept thinking about what advantage consciousness actually gives us sentients. It's definitely a double-edged sword. Having the ability to imagine nonexistent past and future predicaments and given enough time to think of solutions can still be a great evolutionary advantage.
Alternatively, I think of scramblers' evolutionary way just a nerfed version of our self-learning AIs. No individual thought means everything/everyone reacts based on their genetic programming, but the natural way of that programming requires tremendous amount of reproduction, mutation, and time. Foreseeing those problems and changing artificial programmings in advance is definitely more efficient, as long as we don't overthink stuffs.
"Having the ability to imagine nonexistent past and future predicaments and given enough time to think of solutions can still be a great evolutionary advantage."
True - yet, imagine how much more efficiently humans could do so if they didn't waste 99% of that time stuck worrying about and/or desiring specific outcomes!
@@voltijuice8576 I think the best case scenario is if we have some sort of on off switch to enter a dream like state. We could plan what to do before performing a task. Then we switch to an "autopilot" state where we can still see and observe or surrounding yet our bodies are moving on its own. When the tasks is complete or something that needed our attention happened, we can switch back to our fully conscious state. So basically a watered down version of Watt's military zombie.
I frickin love this video. You've got me interested in Blindsight.
The thought occurs that the ChatGPT I've been experimenting with lately is basically a Chinese room, like Rorschach.
Well, there could be life with intelligence without us understanding it at all. Who's to say mushrooms, for instance, aren't intelligent? Because we can't tell? There are MANY people who have experimented with psychoactive mushrooms and are convinced they somehow contain the numerous beings that have realistic interactions with them. More real than regular experience. Just a thought.
I don’t “believe” in what you just said. I know it is true for a fact however. Psilocybin mushrooms are way, way superior to us.
We would very much be able to tell if you broke that mushroom down to its components
@@ausden_prowler you can keep trying to decipher subjectivity with objective processes. You will never achieve your goal though. Psilocybin as a molecule, it's already broken down. The subjective experience will never be broken down.
So glad you did an episode on Blindsight! It’s one of my favorites!!!
I love that novel. Probably the most realistic first-contact novel I've ever read, in spite of vampires actually existing.
They say if it seems too good to be true, it's because it is. I say if it seems too bad to be true, it's because it isn't. The truth is far more harrowing and horrifying than we can possibly fathom. We collectively delude ourselves in our fantasies and naive optimism because it blinds us and shields our consciousness from the sheer horror of existence. Once that veil fades, all that's left is suffering, isolation and terror.
That's why I have a love-hate relationship with sci fi. I find most sci fi on the brighter side boring, corny, hell, even downright stupid. But the darker side, to me, is the true continuation of all of those folk tales that we used to tell when science wasn't as accessible and developped. It reveals something about the Human condition that lighter, brighter tales can't. It can lay bare the hellscape of existence and confront us to the torments of life and the terrifying and hostile nature of the unknown, of the alien, of what could be as far as we know.
HOLY HELL I am SO HAPPY to see you cover Blindsight! Legitimately one of my favorite science fiction books of all time.
wait... isn't that... a ChatGPT?
Peter Watts! Really happy to see you cover Blindsight. Watts is one of the most inventive sci-fi authors of our era, but sadly seems to not be that well known, even amongst avid sci-fi readers.
For anyone interested, on his personal site you can find all (almost all?) of his books for free, including several short stories, some of which are strokes of genius. I'd recommend the short stories The Things and The Island.
The Things is a meticulous retelling of John Carpenter's the Thing from the perspective of the alien organism. Very well done and connects nicely with the themes of selfhood and consciousness in Blindsight.
Why do you call it "The" Blindsight? I noticed it is only Blindsight. It was a good book, nice concepts, even if the author can improve his narrative technique a little. Too bad, it seems from reviews that the follow up this book are some kind of sidequells, not as well regarded. Maybe if Quinn makes a follow up, I will reconsider and check them out
Just discovered this channel a couple days ago, and are already becoming my favorite.
Great video, as usual, Mr.Quinn.
The irony of your statement about the most successful lifeform is not lost.
We live due to the unguided musings of bacteria inside our bodies.
They gift us with a quality of life we take for granted from them but no longer.
Modern medicine is awakening to the fact that we are not alone.
That we cannot ever be alone and those lifeforms that help us live must be protected and encouraged.
The Chinese room conundrum is a profoundly disturbing concept.
That you can have a conversation with a lifeform that is so adapt at regurgitating language and yet, to have no understanding of the communication they are engaging in.
That the entire exercise is to lull you into some form of complaceny.
It is what our mass media have become today.
Mindless regurgitators of political machinations of the masters they serve.
Lulling us into the malaise necessary to control us.
This is easily one of the best, most thought provoking, profound yet terrifying books I've ever read. Soon after I read it the first time I tried to tell different people I knew about the ideas in it, but I could never do it justice, they just looked at me like I was insane. I've read it two or three times since then and it's so densely packed with ideas and subtle foreshadowing that I catch new things every time. 10/10, my questionable cognition highly recommends.
I’ve just finished the book. Watts doesn’t just postulate that self awareness is a hinderance to successful evolution. He states that we are abnormal- that to life in the universe, self awareness is such an abhorrent and illogical curse that just by trying to communicate with Rorschach we are attacking it. Self awareness is like a terrible cancer, that Rorschach instinctively wants to understand first, and eradicate second. Hence the fireflies presence on earth, and the way Rorschach toys with us the way cats toy with their prey before killing it.
Also, as a Christian, I must say this whole story kinda fell flat to me. To an atheist I’m sure this idea is truely horrifying, but as someone who believes a completely omnipotent and self aware deity created me- and that the universe is also self aware in some form- this novel’s revelation fell flat at the first hurdle.
I think we tend to look at everything as "human" because we are human. We see ourselves in everything. We can only identify, draw near to, something that is like us, alive and intelligent. There's a background expectation in everyone that if you watch a rock carefully enough it will say something...
ChatGPT = Chinese Room
consciousness is not a fluke, it's built into life itself
we already know some animals are self aware and maybe all living things are self aware, even microbes. This will help. You have staired into nothingness and have had no thoughts but you exist and you know you exist, you are pure awareness. This is what all living things experience, even microbes.
Blindsight definitely has one of the better imagination of the aliens. Too bad, the second book didn't click for me at all.
Dont look at it as a second part
What kind of parent can't tell their kids that crabs don't have eyebrows??
Rorsarch is great. He figures everything out from the begining. The humans just can't comprehend that they literally have zero advantage over him simply because they're self-aware. "You think I'm just a chinese room?" Their bias is so crippling. They literally only value self awareness. Rorsarch has zero self awareness, and even so, delights in showing the humans the supremacy of "philosophical zombie-ism".
Its really an amazing plot device. The soulless, machine-like, non self aware entity just dabs on the humans, and derides them for their rediculous bias for this useless evolutionary fluke of sentience.
Very dark and cynical book from our perspective, but that's the whole point. Your perspective is idiotic. This self awareness thing just isn't the hot ticket. "Maybe we were unwilling to admit that the singularity happened a long time ago, we were just left behind."
I for one welcome our philosophical zombie overlords.
Without consciousness we could not enjoy the content of your Art.
The bliss of Art makes the suffering worthwhile.
Most individuals are not individuals at all. When they open their mouth, the collective speaks through it.
Ants use pheromones to communicate. Individuals in the collective (lacking self-awareness) communicate using words.
Ants send out scouts and warriors to discover an colonise new territories for the hive to expand into
Is any of this ringing a bell?