Blindsight is an intriguing alien first-contact mystery thriller brimming with ideas.
It's a William Gibson-esque hard sci-fi, featuring clipped, nearBlindsight is an intriguing alien first-contact mystery thriller brimming with ideas.
It's a William Gibson-esque hard sci-fi, featuring clipped, nearly staccato prose, leaning heavily into scientific realism, though in this case more evolutionary biology than engineering and orbital mechanics (though there's something of that in here, too). There's more than a little cyberpunk feel, with various tweaked and techno-augmented transhumans. The speculative biology extends not just outside the spaceship but also inside it and back into the Pleistocene; the commander is an honest-to-goodness vampire, an evolutionary offshoot, yet another hominid, a subspecies of homo sapiens, and perhaps, as one character puts it, not a proper subspecies but a common disorder among a subgroup.
It reminds me of Liu Cixin鈥檚 Three Body Problem (and the rest of the Remembrance of Earth trilogy), both in that it's idea-heavy but also mind-blowingly existential. Both works are deeply unsettling鈥攎y favorite kind of story.
What is consciousness for? The central question of the novel is: What if consciousness, or self-awareness, is superfluous from an evolutionary perspective? I've never encountered this question before, to my recollection.
We tend to associate self-awareness with intelligence. We're proud; we call ourselves wise, make art, and say, 鈥淗ere I am.鈥� It鈥檚 the Cartesian insistence that I matter. I am unique, special in all the universe.
But what if that's just one option? What if intelligence has no need for self-awareness?
The strong evidence: when we鈥檙e in dire straits, something other than the slow deliberative mind takes over.
鈥淚t takes so much longer now to perceive鈥攖o assess the input, mull it over, decide in the manner of cognitive beings. But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best. It sees the danger, hijacks the body, reacts a hundred times faster than that fat old man sitting in the CEO's office upstairs...鈥� (255)
Watts explores the question through a number of transhuman characters, as well as the aliens.
Transhumanism and Neurodivergence Each member of the Theseus crew鈥攆ractured, neurodivergent, or transhuman鈥攃hallenges the primacy of self-awareness in some way: neurodivergent (Siri), multiple personalities or 鈥渃ores鈥� sharing the same body (Susan James/The Gang), mechanically augmented (Amanda Bates, Szpindel, & Cunningham), or biologically reengineered (Sarasti). Additionally, all of them are tied into ConSensus, a kind of intranet integrated into the brain. It allows them to access info and communicate without being in the same physical space鈥攖he internet without the need for an external device.
The protagonist, Siri Keeton, has a hemispherectomy, a radical procedure to treat childhood seizures. After the operation his best friend considers him a completely different person; his mother has trouble relating to him. He has a totally new personality. He has problems accessing feelings and lacks empathy. Like some autistic individuals, he creates heuristics or algorithms to model what people are feeling or thinking. As a result, he can (nearly always) read people through clues that 鈥渓eak鈥� out of them鈥攂ody language and voice patterns鈥攅ven when they say nothing. But his inner life, if it exists at all, is subordinate to his behavioral modeling. Eventually, he makes this complex pattern-recognition his occupation. In his role as a "synthesist" he observes and interprets without necessarily understanding. He 鈥渢ranslates鈥� complex (AI) systems into digestible reports for human specialists. In this way, he acts like the person in the 鈥淐hinese Room,鈥� applying syntactic rules of grammar to manipulate symbols without consciousness, self-aware understanding of meaning.
Major Amanda Bates, the military officer of the ship, controls/inhabits a small swarm of semi-autonomous drones. She鈥檚 able to enter into the sense experience of any drone even as she maintains overall command of the entire battlefield. How, exactly, she鈥檚 able to do this鈥攚ell, that鈥檚 the sci-fi part. Our low-bandwidth brains can only handle one language input at a time. Try participating in a conversation while reading a book or a text-based social media post鈥攜ou can鈥檛 do it. But as a transhuman, Bates can. Bates is a living example of modular, decentralized intelligence: she can drop into the sensorium of any drone under her command, experiencing the battlefield from multiple first-person perspectives simultaneously. Yet she鈥檚 the bottleneck in the process. Her executive function hampers performance. Without having to check back in with her, the drones could work better, faster. Self-awareness, the higher-order cognitive function, slows down processing.
The Gang intentionally split their brain to get parallel processing. The result: multiple 鈥渃ores,鈥� sentient personalities sharing one body. Not a disorder, but a choice. Each core is optimized for a different function (analytical problem-solving, aggression, emotional labor), operating like a team of specialists, and although they take turns 鈥減iloting鈥� the physical form, they seem to have a low-level sense of what鈥檚 happening. They insist that there鈥檚 no prime personality, even though Susan James is the only one with a surname.
Szpindel and then Cunningham, the ship鈥檚 medical/science officer, can extend their senses out to external instruments to directly access data rather than having to laboriously process everything through (the slower, clumsier) language centers of the brain.
Bates, the Gang, and Szpindel/Cunningham each represent different configurations of transhuman cognition鈥攎odular, distributed, extended鈥攏one of which depend on unified self-awareness. Siri embodies the challenge to the primacy of self-awareness: he may be nothing more than a (philosophical) zombie, with intelligence and the appearance of understanding without consciousness. Here鈥檚 how Cunningham describes the kind of zombie Siri might be:
"We're not talking about some kind of zombie lurching around with its arms stretched out, spouting mathematical theorems. A smart automaton would blend in. It would observe those around it, mimic their behavior, act just like everyone else. All the while completely unaware of what it was doing. Unaware even of its own existence." (261)
The Alien Other Similarly, the alien Scramblers are highly intelligent鈥攖hey can quickly solve logic puzzles, seem to engage in strategic maneuvering鈥攂ut seem to lack a 鈥渢heory of mind,鈥� a sense of themselves and the ability. They don鈥檛 "understand" us or themselves in the way we normally expect, or at least don't seem to. As a result, they can think orders of magnitude faster than us.
鈥�I wastes energy and processing power, self-obsesses to the point of psychosis. Scramblers have no need of it, scramblers are more parsimonious. With simpler biochemistries, with smaller brains鈥攄eprived of tools, of their ship, even of parts of their own metabolism鈥攖hey think rings around you鈥hey travel between the stars. This is what intelligence can do, unhampered by self-awareness.鈥� (255)
Alien first contact stories are usually about coming to some understanding of the previously unknown Other. In Blindsight, we can鈥檛 understand the alien Other because the Other doesn鈥檛 even understand itself in a way we can work with.
It鈥檚 terrifying in the same way the initial encounter with the Borg on Star Trek was: a 鈥渟pecies鈥� that can鈥檛 be negotiated or reasoned with because it just consumes, destroys, and assimilates. Still, we can on some level understand the Borg. They are a twisted reflection of ourselves: a collectivist logic turned fascist, but still operating within the conceptual realm of goals, intentions, and strategy.
The Scramblers are more alien: they exist outside our moral and communicative frameworks. They don鈥檛 operate with intention, don鈥檛 possess language in any traditional form. They act, react, even problem-solve鈥攂ut there鈥檚 no 鈥渟elf鈥� to interact with. We reach across the void hoping to encounter a subject, a being, but instead we find nothing. Not malevolence or hostility, just incommensurability. That鈥檚 truly unsettling and for that I give Watt major props.
Conclusion Blindsight is a dark, speculative novel that asks whether consciousness is necessary at all鈥攐r merely an evolutionary detour, misstep, or dead-end. It鈥檚 a novel filled with ideas about the relationship between intelligence and self-awareness and so much more I didn't comment on: perception, speculative biology, and vampires in space. It鈥檚 unsettling in all the best ways, and largely succeeds as a first contact hard sci-fi thriller....more
Let's begin with what this novel is not. It's not a feminist manifesto, despite the title. Neither is it, strictly speaking, a sci-fi dystopian visionLet's begin with what this novel is not. It's not a feminist manifesto, despite the title. Neither is it, strictly speaking, a sci-fi dystopian vision of the future. It relies neither on technology nor supernatural means as a plot device. It's not even necessarily about the end of civilization. How the women got where they are remains enigmatic.
The novel is a creative speculation of women in a dystopian environment, simultaneously a psychological thought experiment about the construction of the self and a philosophical exploration of existence without a wider social context.
The unnamed protagonist is raised in a 鈥淔oucaldian panopticon,鈥� caged with 39 other women under constant surveillance under the threat of the whip. The women discipline themselves to avoid punishment. Among the rules: no touching each other, no self harm.
Once they escape their confinement, it's only into a barren, seemingly endless landscape, 鈥渄otted from time to time with trees, rivers, and nightmare bunkers鈥� (169). As the protagonist eventually recognizes, they stepped out of one prison into another.
The novel bears similarities to some of M. Atwood鈥檚 鈥渟peculative fiction鈥� (The Handmaid's Tale, but also Oryx and Crake) insofar as both extend existing systems of power and control, taking them to their logical extremes. There have been historical instances of social experiments to erase children's background and identities by removing them from their native culture, to see if you could 鈥渒ill the Indian and save the man鈥� (in the U.S. and Canada, but also Australia, New Zealand, and more recently PRC鈥檚 re-education of Uyghurs). In those cases, the attempt was to 鈥渞ehabilitate鈥� or strip individuals of their identity and reshape them into whatever the dominant group thought appropriate.
Harpman conducts a more radical experiment: she asks what remains of a woman when all cultural memory and social conditioning are removed? A woman who has never known men? She is, as much as one can be, a person without history.
There's a temptation to read the novel as simply feminist manifesto. But it is neither systematic nor argumentative. Certainly, it depicts women living without men. Except for the mute guards and dead prisoners, men only appear as the memories of the old women. Behind the text is an implied question: What is a woman when childrearing, sex, and even men aren't part of the equation?
Still, the novel is more than just an exploration of what it means to be a woman without a man to define her; it's about the unsettling question of what it means to be human without external reference points.
Who are you apart from the books you read, the movies and shows you watch, and the music you listen to? What if your job, friends, and family were all stripped away? Who is left?
Unlike the historical (and current) horrific parallels, the protagonist has no past to recover, no cultural identity to reclaim, and no direct knowledge of the world before confinement. The novel is less about loss and more about the fundamental nature of human consciousness when severed from the collective.
The protagonist herself is quite admirable. At times she does give into despair; she has her bad days, like all of us. But on the whole she's surprisingly resilient. She refuses to settle, to let life dwindle into an endless cycle of eating and excreting. 鈥淚 want to go off exploring. I don鈥檛 want to end my days here, eating canned food only for it to come out again later鈥� (116). She is restless. She needs to know. 鈥淚 want to know everything there is to know. Not because it鈥檚 any use, but purely for the pleasure of knowing...鈥� (92). She searches for meaning, patterns, self-definition, something, anything to make sense of the absurdity of her situation. Answers remain elusive, she continues to question. It's a form of existential defiance.
The older women do not share her urgency or need to know. They accept their fate, passing the time with half-formed memories, domestic routines, and slow deterioration. Their thoughts grow sluggish, their ability to reason dulls. 鈥淚 realised that it was difficult for them to pursue a train of thought for long, or to follow an argument through to its conclusion鈥� (69). Without complex social demands that would keep their neurons firing and their brains healthy, a mental fog settles over them.
Does the protagonist think more clearly because she doesn't menstruate, because her reproductive organs seem underdeveloped? It seems unlikely that Harpman is making a biological argument. More likely, it is her sheer lack of a past, the absence of memories to retreat into, that allows her to see the world more plainly.
Once she's free from the burden of the older women, the protagonist decides to set out again, walking towards the rising sun until she discovers a road and follows it.
There's a mystery at the center of the book and it drives the character's actions and reader's interests. But along the way, we come to realize, along with the protagonist, that we're in an epistemic vacuum; we don't know and there's no way of finding out. There's just not enough data or background information. We don't even know what the rules are of this new place with mild weather and almost no seasons.
I Who Have Never Known Men is an amazing piece of work. It hit me like a metaphorical sledgehammer to the chest. At its core, it鈥檚 a radical thought experiment in human consciousness, an exploration of what remains when all cultural memory, social structures, and inherited knowledge are stripped away.
What remains is defiance, or rather the freedom to keep questioning, to refuse a life of mere subsistence, to insist on seeking meaning in an absurd world.
By the end, we realize, as in life, that no answers are coming (from external sources). Ready-made (i.e. religious/theological answers) result from highly imaginative people. Only questions remain and time, which eventually runs out for everyone....more
Oryx and Crake starts with Snowman, who thinks he may be the last man (homo sapien) on earth, waking up to a bleak landscape. He is, though, not entirOryx and Crake starts with Snowman, who thinks he may be the last man (homo sapien) on earth, waking up to a bleak landscape. He is, though, not entirely alone. He serves as a kind of guide or elder to a community of herbivorous, human-like simple creatures who seem more suited to the environment than he. Slowly we learn about Snowman's past, the collapse of society, and his contribution to it.
Despite this somewhat conventional last man setup, Oryx and Crake is not your typical post-apocalyptic novel. It serves as a warning not only of the future dystopia, but of also the conditions that immediately precede it. It's this pre-apocalyptic world鈥搃n Snowman鈥檚 past but our possible near future鈥揑鈥檓 particularly interested in.
In the society before the collapse, climate catastrophe had already reshaped the planet: sea levels have risen, coastal cities swallowed, the midday sun scorches the skin, and animal populations (both wild and domesticated) have dwindled. The seasonal rhythm of the milder climes have collapsed into an indistinguishable blur鈥斺€淛une was now the wet season鈥� (173).
In spite of the environmental ruin, profit-driven corporate capitalism鈥檚 gears continue to turn. Wealthy elites work and play in gated corporate compounds, protected by private security forces (CorpSeCorps), while the rest of the population鈥攖he poor, the displaced, the expendable鈥攁re relegated to the crime and disease-ridden urban jungles called the pleeblands. Government outside of these compounds seems barely functional, if it exists at all.
In this world, technological advancement is directed at satisfying consumer demand rather than solving urgent existential threats. Tech firms recruit talented youth to engineer transgenic lifeforms for spare human parts, develop sex-enhancing drugs, and manufacture rejuvenation serums. 鈥淧ills to make you fatter, thinner, hairier, balder, whiter, browner, blacker, yellower, sexier and happier鈥� (248). That is, they create consumer products that feed base impulses: vanities, insecurities, and the fear/denial of death. Meanwhile, rhetoric majors like Jimmy (who studies in 鈥淧roblematics鈥�) are hired to spin seductive advertisements for these products, weaving myths that manufacture desires.
Atwood鈥檚 pre-apocalyptic world represents an extrapolation of our own world鈥檚 鈥渂usiness as usual" path. As corporations gain ever more power, they accelerate the misallocation of resources away from socially optimal levels; unrestrained, profit-driven scientific research has no inherent ethical boundaries and leads to human experimentation and ecocide. Most would recognize this projection of current conditions into our near future as, to put it mildly, undesirable. To the right-wing faction of the libertarian movement, some of whom are currently trying to dismantle the US government health and environmental protections, it represents the best of all possible worlds.
One of their intellectual heroes is economist Murray Rothbard. What was Rothbard all about? While I am more familiar with his intellectual predecessor, Ludwig von Mises, those who know economic theory better than I do (namely Bryan Caplan who wrote an excellent piece 鈥淲hy I Am Not an Austrian Economist鈥�) say the two are largely interchangeable. Rothbard believed that the private sector could replace government entirely, that corporate control over state functions would lead to more 鈥渆fficient鈥� outcomes. In other words, he advocated for a system that looks eerily similar to the one Atwood describes: a world where corporations act as sovereign entities, the market dictates all human interactions, and any semblance of public good is dismissed as inefficient.
(Rothbard, BTW, was opposed to egalitarianism, civil rights, and, as far as I can tell, was a Holocaust denier, despite his Jewish upbringing.)
His economic views, much like those of Mises, rest on the premise that markets always maximize utility, meaning that government intervention only creates inefficiencies. This is a bizarre and demonstrably false claim. Markets often generate massive externalities鈥攏egative byproducts like methane from industrial cattle farming or toxic runoff from polluting industries. Contrary to Rothbard/Mises, markets do not always yield efficient outcomes and carefully designed government interventions can and do, as a matter of empirical evidence, improve efficiency and increase social welfare. But according to Rothbard and Mises, such interventions are illegitimate because markets, left to their own devices, will always produce optimal outcomes.
It's concerning when unelected policymakers cite Rothbard as their intellectual foundation and use his deeply flawed economic theories to justify their decisions. Basing policy on outdated, discredited economic models isn鈥檛 just foolish鈥攊t鈥檚 dangerous. We wouldn鈥檛 trust an 18th-century surgeon to operate on a patient. Why should we tolerate operating on the body politic using outdated and discredited economic ideas?
Libertarianism is currently having a moment, perhaps because it offers a seductively simple answer to complex social problems: markets are always right, and government is always wrong. But of course social realities are much more complex than that. Markets are indeed powerful mechanisms for allocating resources, but they are not infallible. Government can be inefficient, but efficiency isn鈥檛 the only metric of a functioning society. Fairness, stability, and dignity matter, too.
Oryx and Crake serves as a warning of what happens when we forget this. Unchecked corporate power and blind faith in market forces will lead to environmental collapse, massive social inequality, and the commodification of human life. It鈥檚 a world without the safeguards of government intervention, a world where those with power shield themselves from catastrophe while the rest suffer its consequences.
Some readers might think we already live in such a society. But Atwood鈥檚 novel makes clear that as bad as things are, they could definitely get worse. The only question is whether we recognize the warning, and organize effective resistance, before it does....more
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