05-07-2015, 09:16 PM
I read Blindsight several years ago. It did have some fun ideas that I subsequently found portrayed in Orion's Arm. But I always meant to email Watts and gripe about his portrayal of the super-intelligent-but-non-sapient vampires and computers.
Watts makes the case that consciousness is a processing burden. Fine, I can buy that. However, the problem I had is that his super-intelligent entities is that they supposedly weren't conscious / aware of self despite demonstrating every ability to be so. They were quite capable of thinking about complicated environments with many other entities / objects in the environment, and capable of manipulating themselves with respect to those others. They had to be aware that "self object" differed from the other objects because, you know, they just couldn't think and command other objects/people to do things they way they could their own bodies. They envinced survival behaviors to keep self-object safe in a way not applied to other objects.
So they were clearly thinking about themselves differently than everything else around them, and were incredibly smart, but couldn't/wouldn't make a recursive step to think about themselves thinking about themselves? You'd need some active sapience suppression system.
Watts makes the case that consciousness is a processing burden. Fine, I can buy that. However, the problem I had is that his super-intelligent entities is that they supposedly weren't conscious / aware of self despite demonstrating every ability to be so. They were quite capable of thinking about complicated environments with many other entities / objects in the environment, and capable of manipulating themselves with respect to those others. They had to be aware that "self object" differed from the other objects because, you know, they just couldn't think and command other objects/people to do things they way they could their own bodies. They envinced survival behaviors to keep self-object safe in a way not applied to other objects.
So they were clearly thinking about themselves differently than everything else around them, and were incredibly smart, but couldn't/wouldn't make a recursive step to think about themselves thinking about themselves? You'd need some active sapience suppression system.
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
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"Everbody's always in favor of saving Hitler's brain, but when you put it in the body of a great white shark, oh, suddenly you've gone too far." -- Professor Farnsworth, Futurama
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"Everbody's always in favor of saving Hitler's brain, but when you put it in the body of a great white shark, oh, suddenly you've gone too far." -- Professor Farnsworth, Futurama