This is one of my favorite books and it's fun to read for anyone interested in the AI consciousness debate. https://hpmorpodcast.com/blindsided-00-announcement/ is a podcast that read the book last year. And https://blindsight.space/ is a Watts' approved website that has a short film/movie trailer for the book.
The marginal / ancillary discussion of the usefulness of people in a post GAI world was really interesting. The best part of this discussion was that the protagonists entire job is to translate ideas that are too hard to understand into a tangible/actionalbe "surface area". Essentially - a policy-maker interface that treats superintelligence as a "black box".
The discussion about non-conscious intelligence was less so (I see ants every day!). But this is a new idea dense book to say the least - if you love worldbuilding, please pick it up.
> you hire people like me, the crossbred progeny of profilers and proof assistants and information theorists
> in formal settings you’d call me a synthesist
> on the street you’d call me jargonaut or poppy
> if you’re one of the savants whose hard-won truths are being bastardized or lobotomized by powerful know-nothings interested in only market share
you might call me a mole, or a chaperone
I read Blindsight long before modern LLM AI came about and at the time I thought the aliens being intelligent without being conscious was fascinating and gave me a different perspective that those things could be separated but it didn't have and direct application.
Learning how modern AI's respond immediately made me think about how Rorschach was communicating with the crew and how current LLM AI's might be considered intelligent while not conscious.
the linguist realizes that the alien creatures cannot be, in fact, conscious because of their lack of semantic understanding:
"Our cousins lie about the family tree," Sascha replied, "with nieces and nephews and Neanderthals. We do not like annoying cousins."
"We'd like to know about this tree."
Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? "It couldn't have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them."
So it turns out I'm not conscious either and incapable of semantic understanding, because I've ignored the ambiguities too. Though note that parsing ambiguous sentences used to be exactly what pre-LLM AIs could not do, and what we thought of as requiring real understanding. The exact opposite of what Watts seems to claim.
That is an option. I think we are philosophical zombies a decent chunk of the time. Constant self awareness and mindfulness are calorically expensive. No reason consciousness has to be continuous.
Could be. However note that any current LLM passes this ambiguity parsing test with flying colors- both the implicit choice of the most probable meaning and the subsequent reflection on all the possible alternatives- so if that proved anything it would mean that they're conscious too.
Permutation City is not "far more interesting", it is a complementary exploration of consciousness and the nature of reality. Both are excellent (also both very relevant i-pumps). Permanence by Karl Schroeder is another really good complementary exploration of the idea of consciousness as transitory, a symptom of not being good at the thing that is being consciously cogitated. A cat is so good at being a cat, it does not need to waste resources on clumsy meta-aware calculations on how to cat.
I enjoyed the book but I couldn’t quite suspend my disbelief on the central conceit that you could scramble a simulation temporally and still have something like consciousness or experience. Physics has an arrow of time, and rules of how one state transitions to the next, and I can’t really grasp how you could interpose later frames of reality into earlier time slots and still have a meaningful representation of reality.
Permutation City is one of my top favourites I've ever read. It's a bit nerdy (less so than other Greg Egan books), and it also spooked me in a weird way. For a summary what it is about, it's basically this comic: https://xkcd.com/505/
I feel like the book cheats a little bit. On the one hand, it really wants to explore the p-zombie question, which is (roughly) "imagine there were a non-conscious being that, from the outside, could do everything a conscious one could do." Then, to drive the plot forward, it needs to posit that the non-conscious and conscious beings are actually radically different in their external actions and capabilities. At one point there's a Chinese Room that's obviously non-conscious, but the whole point of the Chinese Room hypothesis is that you can't easily tell the difference from the words it produces.
Blindsight is probably my favorite novel, and I liked echopraxia fine but it was definitely of a different class to me. The worst parts of blindsight are Watts' descriptives (where is everyone right know? What does this area look like? What actions are currently happening?) and Echopraxia suffers from this even more than Blindsight already did.
