Blindsight & the New Fiction
Blindsight by Peter Watts: brilliant!
On the advice of a good friend I spent last night reading Peter Watt’s recent novel Blindsight. It was GREAT. Whiplash-and-flash scifi that is a prime example of the best that the genre can be: brilliantly speculative. Extrapolation, prediction, and what if: Peter Watts proves himself fluent in building worlds of possible outcomes that dont seem so far away. Since this article contains a few mild spoilers, take a couple of hours and read the story online here. Watts wins two internets for making the whole thing available free online! Or, support the guy and buy a paper version.
Blindsight is (at least at first) a classically structured tale of an encounter of the third kind; beginning with unexplained phenomenon of intelligent origin, followed by exploration-and-discovery typical of classic hard scifi, and finally with the cataclysmic encounter itself.
The environment is fiercely dedicated to the cutting edge. Every ship, character, and conversation is saturated with everything that we think might be possible. From neurobiology to quantum physics, Watts packs a phenomenal quantity of recent research into a very short book, topping it off with an author’s commentary that credits the scientists and authors that he borrowed from (well over 100 footnotes) and that presents the logic behind his own creations. It reads like a tour of cutting edge research into space and into our own minds, with sources to boot.
But only superficially. Below all of this, there is a second level of fiction that asks very astute questions about the way we think. By creating a foreign world that is alien both in aesthetics and in epistemology, Watts boils plot into a single, viscous question: what is sentience good for? The answers that he provides are unvarnished and insightful, and while they are not always completely original (what is these days), they offer one of the most accessable in unique perspectives on humanity that I have read. His conclusions are unforgettably powerful, and have had me second guessing my own actions ever since.
I can’t help but think that this type of thought is infinitely valuable. It updates classic philosophies with modern neurology and biology, and points out human weaknesses that may one day be the cornerstone of our place in the Universe. It is a dialogue that we desperately need because it challenges the assumptions that may cripple us (or, in my opinion, has and will continue to), all the while leaving crumb-trails that lead the candy shack in the woods where rational thought is holed up and waiting to be rescued.
The only flaw in the book, at least at this level, emerges when Blindsight confronts the obvious retort/question: “Why then has evolution resulted in high levels of sentience – in all people and for many thousands of years? Why is it anything but vestigial?” Personally I think that Watts cheats his way out of providing an aswer by arguing that many evolved traits convey no real advantage – only fitness (a good chance of having kids). Of course this is true, but the reality is very complex, and in our case tightly linked to social and political environment we create. We don’t just evolve to compete as a species, we also evolve to succeed within the social microcosms that blossom whenever people start living in proximity to one another. At least in part, this is because species level adaptation, which Watt’s perspective relies upon, is a myth. The mechanics of mitosis select at the level of individual genes. The question is not “will a new mutation make a species more competitive,” but rather “will a new mutation make this individual gene more likely to be passed on.”
But honestly people, I’m nitpicking here. Like I said, the book is GREAT. So stop ruining it for yourself and just go read it before someone gives the whole story away, or worse, you doom the entire human race by forgetting how freaking bizarre our own neurology can be.
