This episode is also on Bilibili too.
Today I want to introduce a hard-SF novel that left me deeply shaken after I finished it: Blindsight, by Canadian writer Peter Watts. The book won Japan’s Seiun Award for Best Translated Novel, and was also nominated for Best Novel for all three major science-fiction awards—the Hugo, the Locus, and the Campbell Memorial. It’s a piece of science fiction that many fans consider a true classic.
This novel makes us ask: Why are humans conscious? What is the value of consciousness, exactly?
That’s right: like the miniature science-fiction story The Egg I introduced in the previous episode, Blindsight is also about “consciousness.” But unlike The Egg’s abstract, deeply philosophical reflections, Blindsight is a little more “grounded,” a little more “practical.” Through a story about humans encountering aliens, it asks what the function of consciousness is. It examines the value of consciousness from the perspective of human survival—in other words, from the perspectives of biology and evolution. And the ideas the book offers—or, more accurately, the wild possibilities it opens up—are just as fascinating to chew on.
Before getting into the plot, let me briefly introduce the background. The author of Blindsight, Peter Watts, was originally a biologist studying marine mammals. He switched to writing science fiction, and this was the book that made his name. Probably because he started out as a scientist, his work is packed with rock-solid scientific and technical detail, making it classic hard SF. Blindsight is exactly that: psychological, biological, and physical jargon comes flying at you—bam, bam, bam.
Next I’m going to walk you through the core plot of Blindsight in full, but I won’t go into quite as much detail as I did in the previous episode. The book itself contains a lot of commentary woven into the narrative, and the author has already explained its various settings and ideas quite clearly. I’ll just spend a little time at the end of this episode drawing a few connections around one especially disturbing detail in the novel.
Here’s the story Blindsight tells:
At the end of the 21st century, in 2082, several thousand alien probes suddenly descended on Earth. They arranged themselves in a regular grid across the atmosphere, covering the entire planet, and after releasing a powerful electromagnetic signal, they burned up right there in the sky. This was Earth’s first encounter with an alien civilization, and humanity was scared witless. Once we recovered, we realized that although we couldn’t be 100 percent sure what the probes had come to do, it was very possible that in the brief time they spent descending on Earth, they had already completed a comprehensive scan of information about every aspect of the planet. In other words, for reasons nobody could explain, humanity and Earth had suddenly been put under the microscope by an alien civilization. They seemed very interested in studying us.
But after the probe incident ended, the alien civilization never appeared again. Years later, in the early 22nd century, humanity finally intercepted a signal at the very edge of the solar system, in the Oort Cloud. After analyzing it, we concluded that the signal was connected to the probe incident from years before. So humanity sent an expedition aboard a spaceship called Theseus to investigate the Oort Cloud.
The protagonist, Siri Keeton, is a member of the expedition aboard Theseus. As a child, he underwent major surgery for epilepsy and was left with only half a brain. As a result, Siri almost completely lost his emotions. He became extremely rational and cold, utterly lacking in empathy; he simply can’t experience what other people feel. He’s a lot like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory.
But this actually made Siri an exceptional observer. Since he couldn’t intuitively understand other people, he had no choice but to study them closely and use rational deduction to analyze their intentions. This psychological trait made Siri the best observer and recorder for the job. His task on the mission was to document the entire operation and report back to the authorities on Earth.
Siri is the narrator of Blindsight. The very first sentence of the main text is—
[Imagine you are Siri Keeton:]
And then it begins. The entire book is written in the second person: “you think,” “you say,” “you see.” All of it refers to Siri’s thoughts and experiences. So the novel is essentially the report Siri sent to Earth after the mission was over.
Besides Siri, the other members of the expedition include a linguist, a biologist, an engineer, a soldier in charge of muscle, and the most unusual member of all—the commander of the mission: a vampire named Jukka Sarasti.
You heard me right: a vampire. In this novel, vampires are a real species of human relative, with vitality and intelligence far beyond our own. They went extinct only in the last one or two thousand years, for an utterly ridiculous reason that I’ll get to later. But by the time the story begins, humans have brought some vampires back to life using advanced genetic technology.
In a story about future humans making contact with aliens, the sudden appearance of vampires feels pretty jarring, right? But this setup is extremely important—it connects directly to the novel’s core. I’ll come back to it later.
Back to the story. After decades of travel, Theseus finally reaches its destination, and the crew members in hibernation are awakened. Sure enough, they discover a gigantic alien spacecraft. All the signs suggest that this ship does belong to the alien civilization that sent the probes all those years ago. It looks as if that civilization really has returned to take further action.
Incredibly, the entire alien spacecraft appears to be a living organism. The expedition gives it a nickname: Rorschach.
Because Rorschach generates powerful electromagnetic interference, all the remote equipment Theseus sends over fails one piece at a time. The expedition has no choice but to go in person: they land on the ship, punch a hole through it, and enter the interior. There they encounter a bunch of nine-legged aliens, which look more or less like enormous spiders. The expedition gives these giant spiders a nickname too: crawlers. After a fierce battle that leaves them battered and short-handed, they finally capture two crawlers and drag them back to Theseus. The expedition’s biologist and linguist begin studying them.
Of course, the aliens aren’t going to cooperate politely. So “study” is really more like interrogation. Take the attempt to decipher their language: the method is brutally simple. The crew locks the two crawlers in separate glass cages—we’ll call them A and B—so they can communicate with each other but can’t make contact. Then they show A a shape, say a triangle. On the touchscreen in front of B, they display a group of shapes—a triangle, a square, a circle, and a spindle. Only when B selects the shape A saw—the triangle—does A avoid being shocked. Otherwise, A gets shocked again and again. To avoid the shocks, A is forced to tell B that it saw a triangle. Whether their language uses sound waves, electromagnetic waves, or patterns formed by rearranging the cells on their skin, humans can determine, through endless observation and elimination, what signal A uses to express the meaning “triangle.”
Through these brutal experiments, the expedition more or less establishes a way to communicate with the crawlers.
The next logical step is to test the crawlers’ intelligence and see just how smart they really are. The results are a real shock: these crawlers are so much more intelligent than humans it’s hard to say how much smarter they are. The expedition realizes that capturing two of them was nothing but dumb luck.
But during the intelligence tests, the expedition discovers a bizarre phenomenon that makes absolutely no sense. A and B have extremely high intelligence scores, yet they consistently get one particular type of question wrong. For example, ask A, “Who is in this room right now?” It will point out every human it sees, but leave out one entity: itself.
These crawlers can solve incredibly complex mathematical and physical problems, but the moment a question involves the self, they completely short-circuit. They can even indicate the pain and injuries they are experiencing and describe the logic behind their solutions. But they simply cannot describe “themselves.”
The linguist on the expedition puts it this way: “They’re intelligent life-forms—we already know that. But they don’t seem to know that they know the answer, unless you hurt them. It’s as though blind sight has invaded every one of their senses.”
That’s the line that gives the book its title.
Blind sight is a very strange psychological phenomenon: you clearly see something, but have absolutely no awareness that you’ve seen it.
Blind sight is usually caused by brain damage. Suppose, for example, that the visual cortex in someone’s right hemisphere is damaged. The right visual cortex controls the left half of the visual field. Now hold a small stick in the left side of that person’s field of vision and ask, “Can you see the stick in my hand?” They’ll tell you they can’t. But then ask, “Take a guess: is the stick I’m holding horizontal or vertical?” They take a wild guess, and somehow their accuracy is frighteningly high—far above 50 percent. In other words, at least part of their cerebral cortex has received the image of the stick, but in their subjective experience, they have no awareness of it whatsoever.
They aren’t aware that they can see. That’s blind sight.
And these giant alien spiders, these crawlers, don’t just have blind sight. They also have blind touch, blind smell, blind hearing… On the one hand, they possess superhuman intelligence; on the other, each of them is a living zombie. They have no subjective experience at all. There is no “I” inside their bodies.
The narrator Siri writes:
“Imagine you are a crawler.
Imagine you possess intelligence but never comprehend; you have goals but no awareness of them whatsoever. Your circuits hum, crammed with strategies for survival and the continuation of your species—clever, flexible, even highly advanced—but there are no other circuits to monitor them. You can think anything, but you are aware of nothing.”
We can’t imagine what that would be like, because humans aren’t crawlers. We are conscious; we have subjective experience.
At this point in the plot, we reach the heart of the novel. Through debates among several members of the expedition, and through the narrator Siri’s account, the author begins to ask whether consciousness is actually necessary for a species to survive and develop.
The author’s conclusion is very clear: consciousness is not necessary!
For example, Siri has this passage:
Every pianist knows that the surest way to sabotage a performance is to use consciousness to direct the movements of their fingers. Every dancer and acrobat knows they have to relax the mind’s grip and let the body do its thing. No driver remembers how they stopped and started, turned left and right, on the way to their destination.
We’ve all experienced this, right? If your brain suddenly short-circuited while you were riding a bicycle and you said, Let me think about how my muscles are exerting force while I ride—there’s a very good chance you wouldn’t be able to ride anymore. With activities like playing piano and riding a bicycle, consciousness isn’t merely useless; it’s an obstacle.
But isn’t that a little one-sided? The muscle movements involved in riding a bicycle or playing piano can be handed over to the unconscious, sure, but surely lots of higher-level thought happens at the conscious level, right? Learning something, for example; making plans and decisions; a mathematician calculating a formula, a scientist designing an experiment. These activities must depend on consciousness, right?
But Siri says, actually, not necessarily. AI has become a chess champion, cars have learned to drive themselves, and computer software has extremely powerful learning and research abilities, yet there’s no evidence that any of them are conscious—here are some examples hitting us right in the face. Humans use consciousness to solve these so-called “high-level problems” simply because that’s what humans are used to. That doesn’t mean an intelligent agent without consciousness can’t learn or solve these “high-level problems.” Humans are blinded by their own limitations. It’s like generations of hunters refusing to believe that growing crops could be a way to survive.
In other words, in the view of the protagonist Siri—or, really, the author’s view—“consciousness” and “intelligence” can be completely separate. A sufficiently intelligent being, whether it’s the AI controlling the ship Theseus or a consciousness-free Scrambler, can learn, make plans, and make decisions, without needing an “I” inside it that experiences any of this.
So here’s the question. If consciousness isn’t necessary, where did human consciousness come from? The author has a wonderfully wild idea: consciousness is merely a transitional product of biological evolution, at a particular stage. Its function is really just like the training wheels fitted to a child learning to ride a bicycle.
That particular stage is when an organism’s brain still isn’t powerful enough at processing information.
What happens if an organism’s brain has evolved to an awkward halfway point—capable of processing and analyzing a lot of the information it receives, but lacking the processing power to handle too much of it at once? Well, it can only allocate its limited resources to a small part of the input each time. That process of concentrating attention is consciousness.
For example, take a look at this shape on the screen.
Is the shadow on this cube in front or behind? Keep staring at it and you’ll find that the shadow is in front one moment and behind the next. You’ll never be able to perceive both possibilities at the same time. That’s because your brain doesn’t have enough resources to process both visual possibilities, so consciousness appears and concentrates your limited processing power on one of them, temporarily forgetting the other.
Then there’s this famous rotating dancer illusion. Sometimes you see her turning clockwise, sometimes counterclockwise. Again, your brain doesn’t have enough resources to process both possibilities at once, so consciousness appears and focuses your processing power on one of them.
So, just as a child needs training wheels to help maintain balance before learning to ride a bicycle, the human brain needs consciousness to help distribute its limited cognitive resources before it evolves to become powerful enough.
If we follow this idea a little further, one conclusion follows naturally: once biological evolution gets past this hurdle and the brain has enough cognitive resources—if one day it can process a dancer turning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time—then consciousness will no longer be necessary. The little wheels can come off.
And by then, consciousness won’t merely be unnecessary; it will actually become a burden.
Why a burden? Because once an “I” appears in the human brain, satisfying my “experience” becomes something that seems especially important.
For example, there’s a neural circuit in the human brain that, upon receiving rhythmic sounds, releases certain chemicals and produces a positive, relatively pleasant feeling.
What is this neural circuit for? Monitoring the heartbeat. A steady rhythm in the heartbeat means the body is probably in good shape, so a monitoring circuit like this is obviously useful for survival.
But once we have a subjective experience of that feeling, we become fascinated by all kinds of rhythmic things. The circuit’s function is no longer monitoring the heartbeat; it’s enjoying music. In other words, we get hooked on that boom-boom, beat-beat stuff.
And so all those musicians appeared, all that music was written, and an enormous entertainment industry was created—all of it existing to please this tiny bit of subjective experience in us.
From the standpoint of our subjective feelings, of course, all of this is wonderful. When I’m swaying along to that beat, I’m the ruler of the universe.
But from the standpoint of species evolution, this is an outrageous waste of brainpower. A huge share of humanity’s resources is spent pleasing our subjective experience instead of doing other, more important things. Over time, humanity’s progress toward evolving into a more advanced species has been dragged badly backward.
What about those Scramblers from other planets? They may have eliminated subjective experience and self-awareness early in evolution, then surged ahead along the road of intelligence, leaving humans far behind.
So why didn’t we humans get past this hurdle? Why didn’t we evolve into zombies like the Scramblers?
Here the author opens up another enormous can of wild ideas. The book says that, actually, hundreds of thousands of years ago, a branch species had already evolved among humans. They began moving toward the extinction of self-awareness; their subjective experience grew thinner and thinner, while their intelligence started pulling far ahead of ordinary humans.
What was this branch of humanity?
You must have guessed.
Vampires.
In the novel’s setup, vampires are able to see both the front and the back shadow in that cube illusion at the same time. Their intelligence in receiving and analyzing information far exceeds that of ordinary humans.
So along the normal path of development, it should have been the vampires, not humans, who gradually grew into Earth’s dominant species, ultimately following an evolutionary path similar to that of the Scramblers.
But evolution is always full of surprises. In relatively recent history, they went extinct for an utterly ridiculous reason. It turned out that the vampires’ cerebral cortex contained a very special structure: their horizontal and vertical visual receptors happened to cross-connect, forming a perfect right-angle cross. As a result, seeing anything shaped like a cross could easily trigger intense neural activation, setting off a storm in the nervous system—convulsions at best, death at worst.
Nature had never really produced many things made of two lines that were exactly perpendicular, so vampires survived for many generations without a problem.
But then, unexpectedly, Christianity rose, crosses became ubiquitous, and people stuck them everywhere. The vampires were cursed with terrible luck and gradually went extinct. Humanity had accidentally blocked the course of evolution, stolen the vampires’ crown, and—through sheer dumb luck—secured the throne as Earth’s dominant species.
So, in the universe at large, this form of civilization with self-awareness is actually an extraordinarily rare exception. Other species in the universe got past this stage long ago. Their individuals have extremely high IQs, their societies possess highly advanced technology, and yet they have no consciousness at all.
To those alien civilizations, consciousness was merely a tiny ripple that once appeared very, very far upstream in the great river of evolution. Perhaps they had long forgotten that their ancestors had briefly possessed consciousness.
So when they happened to receive, amid the vastness of space, those radio signals radiating from Earth, they were instantly baffled:
These signals contained huge amounts of information describing human subjective experience. Things like “I’m incredibly happy” and “Now that’s some seriously awesome rock music”—what on earth was all that? And just as we said earlier, once they got the hang of it, they discovered that if these subjective experiences induced consciousness in the aliens’ own nervous systems, the efficiency of their intelligence dropped dramatically.
So for aliens without self-awareness, all this information from Earth related to subjective experience was basically a mental virus. This was a hacker attack on an interstellar scale! The aliens assumed that Earthlings were deliberately transmitting these signals to attack them.
And their purpose in coming to Earth this time was precisely to stamp out the virus.
Humans would never have imagined that a casual “I’m so sad” or “I’m so happy,” tossed out on the phone or in a movie or variety show, would travel through radio signals into the universe and become an interstellar weapon of mass destruction—a mental virus attacking alien minds—ultimately bringing disaster down on us ourselves.
After the investigators aboard Theseus reasoned all this out, the hair on their backs stood straight up. It looked as if humanity’s days were numbered. Perhaps Siri was the only exception: he had no emotions, so he didn’t know how to be afraid.
And just then, the living alien spaceship—Rorschach—began to act as well. It changed the structure of its hull and generated a device resembling a railgun, apparently meaning Theseus no good. The AI responsible for controlling Theseus reacted too. It decided to ram Rorschach and take them both down. After a tremendous mess, the only one who escaped to the lifeboat was the narrator, Siri. He would have to drift through space for more than forty years before drifting back to Earth.
Before entering hibernation, he finished organizing his report—this novel—and transmitted it to Earth.
That is where the novel ends.
But after closing the book and thinking back over its core, I suddenly noticed a question that was terrifying the more I thought about it: Is the narrator of this novel really Siri?
If the goal of an alien civilization is to eliminate human consciousness, and its intelligence is far beyond humanity’s, would it really inexplicably destroy itself along with the human expedition team—and let one human return safely to Earth?
Could Siri Keeton’s escape have been Rorschach’s plan all along?
Think back to the beginning of the novel: [imagine you are Siri Keeton]. Is that such an unusual way of putting it really just the odd rhetoric of a weirdo with no capacity for empathy? Or is it meant literally? Is something simulating itself in the form of Siri Keeton? Is it practicing speaking in Siri Keeton’s voice, imitating his way of thinking as it expresses itself?
Could the person sitting in the escape pod be a “zombie”—someone with Siri’s intelligence, capable of producing all of Siri’s behavior, but with no subjective experience whatsoever, no consciousness? Like the scramblers? And could the reason Siri was chosen be precisely that he has no emotions and already lacks so much subjective experience, making him a better candidate for zombification?
Maybe the name of the spaceship carrying the expedition team, “Theseus,” had already hinted at everything. Philosophy has a famous thought experiment called the “Ship of Theseus”: if a ship’s wooden parts are gradually replaced until not a single piece is original, is it still the same ship? Is a zombie who looks exactly like Siri Keeton still the original Siri Keeton?
So why did Rorschach create a zombie like this and send it back to Earth? Could this state of “zombification” be contagious? Could the Siri we have now already be a carrier of a “zombie virus,” building up to infect the entire human race once he returns to Earth?
If humanity can’t escape it, would that be good news or bad news? If human beings lose their consciousness, do we count that as extinction? Or ascension?
These are just a few thoughts that went flying through my head after I finished the book. The author drops hints in the novel, but never spells out the answers.
The last question I want to pursue is this: the novel’s central premise—that consciousness is merely a transitional form in the evolutionary process, destined to be discarded by evolution sooner or later. Does that idea make sense? Can it hold up? Is the only function of consciousness to allocate limited cognitive resources?
I’ll dig into that question in the next episode. For that episode, I’m bringing in the neuroscience demigod Stanislas Dehaene, and using his popular-science masterpiece Consciousness and the Brain to pit him against Peter Watts. We’ll see what consciousness actually does in the eyes of one of the world’s top neuroscientists.
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