Review: Blindsight by Peter Watts

3.5 stars. But the ideas are just interesting enough that I decide to round up.

The good

1. This book explores some big, amazing, deeply fascinating ideas. It has as many big ideas as a Liu Cixin novel, which says a lot. I regularly had to put the book down and pause to consider these ideas or Google them for more info, ending up in lots of Wikipedia rabbit holes as a result.

Here are just a few of the most interesting ideas that came up (marked with spoilers, just in case):

• Blindsight: This is the concept after which the book is named. The idea is that some people have eyes that work just fine (i.e., the lenses, retina, etc all work), but due to brain damage, they can’t consciously see, and report partial or total blindness. However, they might be able to see unconsciously: e.g., catch an object thrown to them. So their brain is seeing, but they aren’t consciously aware of it: the visual information makes it to some parts of the brain, but not all.

• Anton syndrome: This is almost the opposite of blindsight, where some individuals who are actually blind, “affirm, often quite adamantly and in the face of clear evidence of their blindness, that they are capable of seeing.” They will dismiss all evidence to the contrary or invent all sorts of stories to explain it.

• Cotard’s syndrome: A rare mental disorder where some individuals hold the belief that they are dead or do not exist. The book mentions that the human brain has all sorts of built-in “gauges” that it uses to determine its state: e.g., our inner ear lets us know if we’re upright or upside down. Perhaps there is a “gauge” of some sort that we use to determine if we’re alive or exist, and perhaps it’s possible for that gauge to malfunction!

• The Chinese Room: A thought experiment that questions whether intelligence requires consciousness, and whether a computer can have a “mind” or “understanding” or “consciousness.” The Wikipedia article on this is well worth a read. And the book plays with the idea quite a bit, forcing us to pause and ask whether all people really have consciousness.

• Consciousness: The book has a lot of discussions over whether consciousness is actually a beneficial trait to intelligent beings, or a harm. In fact, the book poses the question of why we have consciousness at all? We seem to make decisions just before we are consciously aware of them, so it doesn’t seem involved in that; when we have to think fast (e.g., reflexes in response to danger), our unconscious has to take over, as consciousness is way too slow; when we learn things really well, we typically do them unconsciously (e.g., driving, reading); and so on. If anything, consciousness seems like an energetically expensive burden that is highly inefficient. So why do we need it? Will other intelligent animals have it?

• Empathy: The book poses lots of questions about empathy. For example, is it about imagining what the other person feels? Or imagining what you would feel like in their situation? Can you be truly conscious, and human, without empathy? If you have machinery built in that can use all sorts of external signals to accurately detect how someone feels, without really understanding it yourself, is that the same as empathy? Better? Worse?

• Saccades: The human eye doesn’t really stand still, but rather, the eyes constantly jump around, making rapid movements known as saccades, then pausing, then moving again, and so on, to build a 3d map of the full scene. What’s fascinating is that we are not aware of all this movement: the movements happen extremely quickly, and while they are happening, we are actually blind, but our brain automatically fills in the gaps. The book makes great use of this to posit an alien that is able to detect these saccades and move only while they are happening, effectively becoming invisible to the observer.

1. This book has an excellent portrayal of alien life that feels, well, truly alien. In most movies and books, aliens are just humanoids that have slightly different skin or other minor changes, but in this book, they are completely different, not only in appearance, but also behavior, biology, and so on. Given how hard it is to understand or communicate with other animals on our own planet, and how truly bizarre some earth animals can be (e.g., the octopus), it seems likely that an alien species can only be considerably harder to understand and communicate with. I also appreciated the idea that, to an alien species, the mere act of trying to communicate with them could be interpreted as an attack!

2. Lots of cool sci-fi concepts: anti-matter drives; virtual reality worlds (including “heavens” you can live in perpetually if you want to get away from the “real” world); transhumans, who dramatically augment their bodies and minds; etc.

The not so good

• I found the writing very confusing. Not the terminology or sci-fi concepts—all of those made sense—but just the basics of what was happening in the plot. I’m not sure why, but I always felt like the book was skipping around, omitting critical details, and then forcing you as a reader to scramble and try to catch up. This sort of writing technique can be effective in a mystery story, as a way to heighten the mystery and make the reader feel a part of solving it, but here, it wasn’t used to drive the mystery, but just in very basic plot points and dialog. I’d often have to go back and ask, wait, what just happened? Who did that? Who is this? What are we talking about again? At points, it was so bewildering, I wanted to give up on the book entirely… But then I’d hit one more “big idea” that would keep me reading. Still, it’s a frustrating and not especially pleasant read.

• None of the characters act like humans. I mean, I get it, we are dealing with transhumans, but it made it hard to really care about any of them.

• Why the hell are there vampires in this story? It’s otherwise a hard sci-fi, but, for no reason that I can see, there is a random vampire in charge of the crew. I found it super jarring. Almost comical. I mean, I guess the vampire was supposed to be (a) creepy and (b) super intelligent, but you could have a transhuman that is both without resorting to vampirism.

Rating: 4 stars