[madrox]

No one has ever made me feel horror and despair like Peter Watts. His books stare directly into the abyss. I think it's what makes the hope you feel at the end seem earned.

If you haven't read his work but you spend time thinking about HCI, you should.

[AnthonBerg]

I see people differently after reading Blindsight; The picture is much darker, concretely more accurate, with what light is there geared to all hell and so much brighter. I'm better for it and at a greater peace.

[cdrini]

I quite enjoyed Blindsight, but that was not my takeaway at all :P How do you see people differently after reading it?

[madrox]

I'll give my own interpretation, which is different from the parent though maybe we arrive at the same place.

Blindsight dismantles a lot of noble myths about what it means to be human and human exceptionalism. The things you read and see in all kinds of stories. It makes you appreciate how easy and unconscious it is to settle for comfortable lies over truth about how smart or great you are. I think this is what freaks a lot of people out about whether AI is conscious, actually.

I think the hope comes in if you embrace the implications for yourself, because to be otherwise is to be unconscious.

[AnthonBerg]

Hard to pin into words!

We're unconscious of how unconscious we are?, and it's good to… what's the term, suffer gladly and give gladly? To own one's unconsciousness and raise it, and expect and see others' unconscious going about major things in life - to see it coldly as well as warmly.

I find this is more accurate and safer than assuming consciousness in everyone, and it also reveals so clearly people who do cast that light; and see.

It's less desolate! I promise! Sounds like it's worse but it's not. That's the tricky-get-into-words part, you know?

[zehaeva]

Thank you for this! I have read Blindsight but I have long wondered why everyone thought it was so revolutionary. I kept thinking I was missing something. And I think this is it! In that I already thought/knew that everyone is basically sleepwalking through life and are not really conscious of what's going on.

I came to my conclusions on this mostly through my own studies on Illusions and other studies on consciousness. Knowing basic facts of how we see, and all the ways that our sight, touch and hearing really, fail us. Seeing the studies of how people who have their hemispheres separated can have parts of their body act independently of each other really blew my mind when I first learned about it.

Too many people believe that they themselves are sitting in a box and looking out through windows when really we're in a dark room reading a bunch of instruments and guessing what's out there. Plato's Cave is real and we are, all of us, already inside it.

[dreamcompiler]

I like this. Most people are doing the best they can while running on autopilot most of the time.

I think free will is possible but it requires a level of training and introspection and practice that most people find unpleasant, so most people revert to autopilot.

[patcon]

thanks for finding these words! i find myself getting less "nice feelings" of any depth on the internet lately (perhaps I am complicit), but your words are a breath of fresh air :)

[fouc]

the fun thing is to realize we were actually p-zombies all along, hallucinating that we have qualia.

[ViscountPenguin]

Eh, I love blindsight, but I really think it oversold the case against consciousness and for belligerent intelligent life.

[cfiggers]

I agree with you on that point. It seems to me that people who read Blindsight and get all existential are not thinking things through all the way.

Blindsight poses the question, in essence, "What if consciousness is a competitive disadvantage, in which case non-consciousness would be Better™?"

I can't make a conclusive case one way or the other w/r/t the premise—it may perhaps be the case that consciousness is a competitive disadvantage. I don't know how we could test that without something to compare ourselves against (which is why the book resorts to introducing vampires and aliens—this question is untestable otherwise). But the conclusion, that non-consciousness is somehow "Better™," falls absolutely flat for me. "Better™" is a value judgement. Values and Judgements are both features of consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no such thing as "better" or "worse", there is only "is" and "is not."

So: speaking as a conscious being (you'll have to take my word for that), I'm quite comfortable saying that I like being conscious. And with unconscious living organisms—like, I don't know, coral reefs or whatever?—it's not so much that they like being unconscious as that they don't "like" anything at all.

So I think I'm quite comfortable continuing on being a "competitively disadvantaged" thing (supposing that's even the case, which it just as plausibly is not), that is at least able to conceive of questions like this one and make value assessments of its own, rather than despair over the alleged competitive disadvantage inherent in the fact that I experience myself and the world.

A computer can beat me at chess, sure, but it cannot care that it has done so.

[throwway120385]

How do you know that values and judgements have anything to do with being conscious? A machine can act like it has values and judgements and we wouldn't attribute any consciousness to it. Or if you've seen a dog tear up a garbage can every time it's owner leaves, I wonder if you're watching an expression of dog values. Is the dog conscious?

[cfiggers]

> How do you know that values and judgements have anything to do with being conscious?

The terms "value" and "judgement" have a broad semantic range. I mean to use them here in a sense that presupposes an exercise of subjective preference.

Machines, amoebas, programs, etc. can make choices, yes, and they can weigh alternatives, sometimes by assigning scores (aka "values") to differing outcomes. When I say that "Making value judgements is something that, by definition, conscious beings do and that non-conscious beings do not do," I'm trying to establish a narrower, more restricted definition than the broadest possible meaning of "value" or "judge."

So it's not that I "know" that values and judgements have anything to do with being conscious; I'm using these terms in such a way that by definition they do, because that's the set of things I want to talk about. The question then is not whether I'm right or wrong yet, but rather once we restrict the set of all things that could be called a "value" or a "judgement" to only the ones that I'm trying to make qualified assertions about, whether that set is empty (in which case everything I'm saying still evaluates to True, but vacuously and therefore uselessly so!).

I'm arguing this way because I think that narrower set a) exists and b) is relevant to the argument I'm making.

> Is the dog conscious?

I think dogs are unquestionably sentient (i.e. they are able to detect and respond to outside stimuli), and seem to display, in some minimal degree, at least an approximation of sapience (i.e. they are able to understand themselves and the world around them; hold and express preferences; form relationships and make decisions based on them).

I don't have a way to test whether a dog is conscious or not, and the dog has no means of trying to persuade me one way or the other; so I have to remain frustratingly agnostic on that point (frustrating to myself as much as I'm sure to you).

[veidr]

What? Of course... of course the dog is conscious.

Did you mean dogs don't have values and judgements? I suspect they do, and those might be much more different than dog consciousness vs human. And one judgement might be "human gone; i do wtf i WANT bro" or, you know, something vaguely like that.

[gpderetta]

Better here is purely in evolutionary terms, i.e. would a sub- or non non-conscious life form out-compete conscious life forms in its niche.

[XorNot]

It wasn't a competition though just mutual incompatibility: aliens so alien that we can barely comprehend their motives and are implicitly regarded as hostile by our manner of existence.

I'd say the case it was making has only become more relevant with the chatbot age.

[gpderetta]

> I'd say the case it was making has only become more relevant with the chatbot age.

Exactly. The central thesis, consciousness not being necessary for intelligence, is very relevant today.

Of course, the existential horror background in the book was also quite well done.

[XorNot]

Which reminds, generative AI means we should be able to get the book version of Chernoff faces into grafana now...

[ViscountPenguin]

There's something interesting here, where the very thing that prompted the LLM boom (transformer networks) was the thing that introduced a higher level of information integration into neural networks; under the somewhat mainstream theory (not to say uncontroversial, though) that consciousness is a function of Integrative Information (IIT), it could be said that transformers are in a real way more conscious than previous architectures.

[AnthonBerg]

I have no conscious awareness of what I wrote, I just tried to be Peter Wattsy, haha

(kidding!

It's oversold, or beautiful artistic expression of something. Bleak, yes; Stark; Also beautiful.

The thing it expresses is… a thing. We're not at all as conscious as… we think?, as we portray ourselves?, to others and/or ourselves? And it's magical to view people as… partially unconscious to a significant degree while also loving them and with respect.)

[lanstin]

And knowing that another person sees you clearly and still loves you, that is magical. As well as useful since you can have discussions and make decisions based on the realities of your self without having to achieve some mythical self awareness.

[dreamcompiler]

"Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s

[mrec]

He's very proud of having been rejected by a Russian publisher for being "too dark".

[donw]

Have you tried contacting Google for customer service? I’ve found that to be a sure-fire cure for whenever I catch a case of optimism.

[UncleOxidant]

I haven't read anything from Peter Watts, but I have read Cormac McCarthy and what you're describing sounds like that.

[subscribed]

Oh man, no, no, it's a different experience entirely. Not as shredding as McCarthy (The road or Blood Meridian alike).

Start from Blindsight and read the afterwords.