In the anime Frieren creatures called Demons mimicked human behaviour in order to feed on humans. Frieren, a 1000 year old elf, understood this and whenever she came across a demon, she realised it was a non-sentient being, originally a plant like creature, which evolved into a human looking creature with the ability to communicate in order to eat humans. Most of the humans in Frieren’s world did not understand this and kept on giving them human like motives, which gave them the delusion you could negotiate with demon’s. In reality this was like a fly negotiating with a spider, in the end futile.
They are clearly sentient in the show. The demon sorceress she kills crys while dying with no one watching her to trick and the demons display arrogance and pride multiple times.
@@goatskin4487 You are correct there are points where the demons display anguish when they know they have lost and die, but whether this is true sentience or simply the cry of a non-sentient life form which is dying is debatable. From a character-arc point of view adding some emotion to the demons make them more relatable and there is example of this, especially when the demon displays pride. The same thing occurred with the Borg. The original Borg were a collective with no emotion, but this proved boring so the Borg queen was born. Its even debatable if the original Borg was sentient, although they certainly would of started as sentient. The Borg queen was clearly sentient. I have to go back to Frieren's original description of the demons, where she strong implied they have no sentience. They are on auto-pilot.
Peter Watts said that his in on the story was through being stuck on the 'wrong' panel at a sci-fi con. I think he might even have had to field a 'what if' question about Twilight vampires being real. The whole towering thing grows out of coming up with the idea of variant humans (vampires are far closer to standard h. sapiens than chimps are) that were obliged to eat us (they don't produce all of the proteins they need) but adapting their prey being very slow to mature: there can't be many pre-farming humans in a given area. So there can't be many babies born in the range you can walk to. So you can't eat many of their parents without sending them extinct. Therefore the vampires have to learn how to slow their metabolism right down every once in a while. For a few /decades/. Conveniently enough time for people to have forgotten "when Steve got eaten by crazy long-limbed super-people", and just have legends from their grandparents about Naughty Steve, and the demons in the dark. Slowing your metabolism right down sounds a lot like something suspended animation. And that sounds like one of those things sci-fi loves, so now we're off the races on why bringing back vampires has a solid advantage for newly fledgling space-faring species. Peter Watts should have become far, far richer off that book.
@SomeOtherPooma His vision of vampires, and ability to make them plausible is one of the best things in that book, and Jukka Sarasti is arguably the most interesting character. Siri just came across to me as being autistic.
Quinn's ideas goes in depth about this book and the ideas in it too. Doesn't surprise me that many people don't or can't make the leap from "I think therefore I am." to "Those around me think there fore they are as I am.". I've worked in customer facing jobs most of my life and you can see it in the various ways different customers and employers treat employees.
If you work in a jail, you get to see what happens when someone doesn't make the leap AND isn't smart enough to realize they should pretend like they did anyways.
@@jerrycan1756 A very, very large fraction of the populace possesses neither. It is simply that they aren't driven to act to the point it brings down the societal hammer. They grasp nothing besides immediate impulse and reward, can think no more than one step ahead, but their offenses are small because causing direct harm is often hard. But we end up with the question of if recognizing this truth poisons our own humanity because 'those around me do not think therefore they are not as I am' can well be the death of compassion.
Seems to me many people are non-sapient and faking empathy. There's no reason to suppose all brains work alike, they are not the same and there are identifiable consistent differences between male and female and various races/ethnicities. Would never be politically correct to really seriously study this and indeed its the case we must pretend men and women are identical in cognitive functionality nowadays.
@@LordPickles03 I think it's because he doesn't really dress up his footage - it's just him discussing the topic. I remember I almost passed over him the first time because some part of me equated production value and content quality, but if you listen for more than a minute you realize it's good.
I love Peter Watts. I owned a tiny bubblehead figurine of him which I keept in my left pocket at all times. When I was going through tough times, I kissed the bubblehead on the forehead and it gave me strength. Sadly, one day I was shot at in a robbery gone wrong, and the figurine took a bullet that was meant for me. "Do not be afraid", I remember it telling me, "Peter Watts is here" it said. The robbers then started speaking chinese, and their heads popped like balloons a few moments later. Afterwards, I searched all over the store for my little Peter, alas it was gone. Anyways, cool video
Until it becomes weaponized by an infiltration specialist enemy group. Like has happened across the whole of western civilization. Pathological altruism is going to be the end of civilization unless it is corrected against.
It can be simulated more efficiently that with the experience of empathy. The slick easy charm of psychopaths is the best example of this. Empathy makes people work together in ways empathy simulation doesn't though. Self sacrifice is one form of it.
This was a trippy novel I was not nearly mentally equipped to sufficiently comprehend all its subtle complex details and wider philosophical implications when I first read it as a teenager. Even now as an adult I find it helpful to listen to audio narrations of the story to mold over.
I never read the book, but I've been struggling with the video essay on it presented here. OMG. Normally I don't like horror stories, but this seems like it's more of a psychological mindf**k. Love your userID, btw.
In university I actually had the "Synthesist" profession promoted to me by somebody who'd never heard of Peter Watts, while on an academic project. I can't be sure but I think the major it lines up with is "Intercultural communications" or maybe something with the word "Facilitators" and "Interdisciplinary Studies", but the gist of the role was that a project required cooperation between a specialized field of CS, a specialized field of MechE, a specialized field of sociology, and a specialized field of ecology, and this unique generalist person was there to set baseline communication parameters because these people were going to talk past each other all day otherwise using words and concepts that didn't even extend to the rest of their college/departments. They used graduated levels of abstraction to break down statements in a discussion.
It also occurs to me that this is the same role that was filled by the character Tom in the movie Office Space. "Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the God-damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that?"
I forget if it was Heinlein or Asimov who felt at that time... 50 freaking years ago... That knowledge was getting too siloed and these kind of interlocutors would be necessary
There's a key insight in Blindsight that makes it worth a re-read if (like me) you didn't pick up on it for the first time. Siri himself is a metaphor for consciousness in his role on the crew: a synthesizer, a storyteller, unspecialized, and utterly unnecessary.
Allegedly, Neill Blomkamp (visionary sci-fi director of _District 9_ and _Chappie),_ is (or was) working with Peter Watts himself on a film based around the resurrected "vampires" like Jukka Serasti from _Blindsight,_ possibly as a precursor to a later _Blindsight_ film in its own right, but more probably as a stand-alone existential sci-fi horror flick. Needless to say, I hope he succeeds. The idea of a pharmaceutical corporation bringing back Man's most terrifying predator for profit in the hubristic expectation of total control and containment is a delicious thought, _a la Jurassic Park_ but with the theoretical hominid sociopaths that inspired our Uncanny Valley fight-fright-or-flight instinct.
I don't see Blomkamp getting the budget he'd need to do justice to a Blindsight adaptation, but a smaller film about the vampires could work on a more spartan budget.
@@Green_Tea_Coffee I mean, they made the _Doom_ movie on shakier adaptive ground with a less reputable director, and (as its own thing detached from _Doom 3),_ it worked.
@@Mr.Ambrose_Dyer_Armitage_Esq. Ehh. I wasn't a fan of the adaptations of DOOM. It's so weird to me that it's basically the simplest concept in the world, yet every time they try to make it into a movie they can't get it right.
@@Green_Tea_Coffee _Doom: Annihilation_ was rubbish, the first one just needed to be all or mostly FPS scenes like the final sequence. It should've been a longer film, though, with more time to establish ambience, or a mini series. Shame they dropped the supernatural aspects, but it still remains a guilty pleasure of mine; saw it as a kid at a sleep over and it scared the ever living shlt out of me.
Hey man, glad to see your channel doing so well! I first came across your channel with the Cyberpunk 2077 Post-Capitalism video, and I binged your whole catalog... That really helped me out as I was going through some difficulties at the time... and thanks to your videos I had something to focus on other than woe is me... I was the guy that suggested STALKER to you... So, thank you, and keep up the good work! Happy holidays!!! 🤘😁🤙
Sometimes we all need a distraction. I've been slowly playing through Stalker since then. Not much time for gaming lately, but there' definitely some things to talk about in there.
As a new subscriber I'd be delighted to see a stalker video, although I think a more than surface knowledge of the ideas developed there would be necessary
Its clearly fresh and great channel, great intellectual and though provoking talk about Scifi and other subjects with dash or real world stuff, when most of youtube is so bland same old, same old lore videos, 10 things... or rage bait.
All of Peter Watts' novels are like that. Great world building, interesting philosophical content, lots of footnotes justifying his world building, but much like the fantasy world of Attack on Titan, I would not want to live there.
I've been subscribed since this channel had 300 subscribers and it's so incredible to see it grow like this. Thank you for keeping it up, Mr. Historian!
I was never more glad in my life to know I was different when I learned that a lot of people don't have an internal dialogue... I was like "how is that even possible? How can you not be able to talk to yourself inside your mind? wtf"
The idea that there are people that can't think without squishing all the concepts into those inadequate packages called 'words' is horrifying to me. Don't get me wrong; words have a... permanence that non-word concepts don't, precisely because a lot of the interesting edges have been filed off. But mentally confined to words? Ick.
You wonder why some people can't seem to grasp future consequences... This could be a huge factor. I also couldn't fathom it. My internal monologue is the loudest voice I hear.
Idk I kind of would love that. "Oh man is the only feeling thing amongst the stars? Time to take the stars then, no moral implications, they don't even know they're alive when we burn em."
It's like the colonization of the Americas - the first one, the one that crossed the Bering Straight. As long as you don't plunder yourself to extinction, you can do whatever you want!
the problem is besting them as portrayed, it would be very, very, very difficult, without, according to the book's logic, useage of men and machines who could think similarly
For while I thought I had a problem of not empathizing but eventually I figured out that I over empathized. I assumed people were just like me and had similar motivations, but figured out that, in many cases, my motivations are very different than other people. For example, I don’t really care about social status, therefore I had a huge blind spot understanding the motivations of people heavily driven by status. I also have a very hard time lying, I take pains to say things without embellishing, most people naturally augment stories with very biased nuance without even realizing it. Empathy is a tricky thing
This is more relevant than ever since ChatGPT came out in 2022 and RUclips has been SATURATED with autogenerated content. What really freaked me out was the point when Rorschach, itself a dumb AI “Chinese room” without true consciousness, is still…”interactive” enough to respond “oh, you think I’m one of those Chinese Rooms? I’m not!” …this is scarier to me than a hostile but conscious alien entity.
I've hit the point where any sort of video that has a professional narration with no emotional intonation, put together with AI or stock visuals gets an automatic thumbs down and the option "don't recommend this channel" selected. I imagine that within the next year, even those cues will become hard to pick up on, and I'll have to resort to only watching videos from content creators who actually appear onscreen, but even that isn't going to be a long-term guarantee.
Rorschach is not dumb at all. What they communicate with might be a chinese room, but the intelligence behind it is scarily smart and playing a game of first contact on many orders of magnitudes above us ape-brains. It's made a bit more clear in the sequel what is happening, but the ship AI talks about it a bit at the end of Blindsight.
Looking rather sharp in that coat. I really enjoyed Blindsight and my girlfriend who is not a huge sci-fi reader found it fascinating. I look forward to seeing a video about Echopraxia at some point too. I love the way Peter Watts just floods the reader with all these constant complicated details. I keep thinking about the protagonist from Echopraxia at the beginning of the story doing some biology/zoology work out in the field and casually noting that his specimines are contaminated with fragments of old mundane human information. Like that they devoloped the technology to store files in the form of something comparable to dna but that it perhaps persists in the environment and now it has become a whole new category of pollutant.
Not only that but biohackers making grasshoppers that sets forest fires. And other human/AI/vamp made species polluting the genepool of the natural world. It's actually a hot topic today, like for example farming salmon stock escaping and breeding with natural local populations, which in extreme can cause extinction of the local genepool. I bet it's gonna get just as crazy as in Echopraxia as biotech matures even more.
That bit of the book was both really poignant, and a pretty good indicator of where things are headed, e.g. with plans to release self-replicating vaccines, or mosquitos that are coded to mate, but not breed with wild mosquitos.
I have been using Chat GPT to speed up my automation development, and also asking it for information. This novel very much comes to mind as interact with Chat GPT.
I think this idea was also played with in a short story by Isaac Asimov as well, with the upshot of it being that it turns out that consciousness is a disease, somewhat similar to cancer. I should probably look that story up again, I read it like 30 years ago.
Since after a certain point in our evolution, successful use of tools became the only significant driving force behind further evolution. It drove curiosity, social organization, language and most of all, abstract cognition. It impacted imparting knowledge to others as a social force and the need for better communication skills and the modification of curiosity into an early impulse in children to acquire knowledge. It accidentally spawned our conscious awareness as well. At least in some portion of the population. I point you to another Science Fiction story "No Fire Burns" written in 1959 by Avram Davidson, in which there's a research about humans in which "No fire burns" that are normal to all appearances but essentially like zombies, interacting with the world and society around them as non-introspective operators, motivated only by sociopathic needs and their early indoctrination oblivious to anything other than their programmed functions and needs being meet, fully reactive. It explains a great deal.
To add a wrinkle to the 'dangers of AI' talk that I think this topic touches. I'm reminded of a phrase that summed up the real dangers nicely - "I less concerned about an AI becoming 'like a human' than I am of people becoming 'like AIs'". What offloading and parallelizing one's creative intelligence to algorithms tends to do... More on subject - I have never been able to bring myself to get into Blindsight. It's always been sold to me as this pillar of hard sci-fi. I can't take it seriously as that with the conceit of space vampires included. Feels like an immature contrivance along with the tone one of the crew of a first contact crew's dialogue referenced in this video. It all rubs me the wrong way. Probably just a me problem. Curious if anyone else feels similarly. Great vid as always, Feral. Merry Christmas. Catch you in a week if you're not taking it off for the holiday.
I too rolled my eyes at the first mention of "vampires", but they're honestly one of the best parts of the book. Watts is a biologist, and these vampires were born out of a pet project he undertook to try to find a plausible biological/evolutionary explanation for all the classic traits of the vampire. Reading all the different explanations he came up with was great fun. Plus the vampire captain, like all the other crew members, are ultimately there to reinforce the whole books theme about the value of sentience from different angles. I was actually impressed that the vampire wasn't just there for the "cool" factor but because it was another supporting pillar of the argument the book is laying out.
I thought the vampire thing was stupid at first, too, but Watts manages to pull it off. The dialog and characters are fine for the kind of book this is, but the way a lot of them talk and act, they come across to me as being autistic, except for Sarasti.
You could make the argument (and it's indirectly touched upon in the video) that the reason is that the vampire is, well... actually human. As in, _we_ are the vampires, evolutionary speaking (as regards to intellect, and mental model, that is).@@Green_Tea_Coffee
As a candidate crisis, have you heard that O3 was just released and absolutely CRUSHED the test specifically designed to measure general intelligence (ala AGI) that all of the other models failed at? It pretty clearly is AGI at this point, though moving the goalposts has already begun. AGI but not consious. Seems fitting for this video.
And, yes, it is just apparently a "happy accident" the the Apple AI is called "Siri". No relation. But the sort of thing that Scott Adams might say is "the Simulation winking at us.
And now I have another book on the list. Sending this to my son, an astrobiologist. Something for him to ponder as he looks at gas clouds a hundred plus light years from here.
As a Type 1 Bipolar person this video struck a nerve but all your videos are great. Discovering "Prayer for the Roller Boys" alone was worth subscribing. I really enjoy all your old tapes and don't feel the need to comment since your analysis is so good.
The sequel to this book was fun, but I'm forever mad at the author for depriving our boy the MC from his Vamp wife. The book never adequately explained why none of the H-Saps ever found the vamps attractive. Especially the scene where she performs a superhuman party trick in a room full of drunk as dogs college students, the reaction of everyone sobering up and not a single one giving a hoot type reaction was extremely unrealistic. Speaking as one myself if a girl can solve 3 rubik's cubes while somersaulting and can rip my head off with a pinkie finger, that's a jackpot.
I think a good test of consciousness is spontaneous empathetic interaction with an inanimate object. Like the idea of a pet rock is a completely one way relationship with zero utility or social cues, so it'd be next to impossible for a non-conscious entity to develop on their own.
Not necessarily. A non-conscious entity with sufficient brute-force power can emulate consciousness perfectly, that's the entire crux of the discussion in the book about if consciousness even matters.
Dont know if this will be seen but I genuinely appreciate these little, but intensely thought provoking videos. Years in the military had me very locked into a way of thinking about how I see the world. But as my children get older and I start calming down and really thinking about what kind of world they're going to be inherited from me I thank you Feral, this channel has become my pondering hour when I get a few moments of quiet time. God ..I think I will have that Zima you keep going on about.
Best. Book. Ever. I think it’s beyond brilliant. Honestly, I don’t use the phrase “life changing” lightly - and I don’t think I would use it for any other piece of media. But this book changed the way I look at the world. It’s hard, hard, hard science fiction and requires some real work to process, but it’s worth the effort. If you like Greg Egan, you’ll love Peter Watts. He has a lot of very good books but Blindsight is his best.
This Chinese Room reminds me about video I saw long time ago. English speaking tourist visited Asian country (don't remember exact one, probably Japan). He knew local language to some extent. He foud a local snack shop run by a single woman. Location had a high number of tourists who mainly spoke English. She couldn't learn English, but because the assortment of her shop was quite small (I think it was like a single specific food), she came up with an interesting solution. She created a list of phrases that she could read to talk to tourists. It would appear like she could understand and speak English, but in reality she would just read an appropriate response to a phrase a tourist would say.
I wonder if Vampire World would end up being all that much different than what we have now. Remember, in an equilibrium state there aren't many of them, they can't stand to be around another vampire, and they need the baselines. A cannibal psychopath in the C-suite, odd rumors that never come to anything, among the baselines. People, a few, disappear, now and then and its never solved.
I'm listening to audio version of Blindsight now, so this is really timely, thank you. I've had a hard time getting my head around what's happening, so it's good to get plot sanity check here. It seems to me the Chinese Room metaphor the main character brings up is very much like ChatGPT
The whole “Chinese room” concept is fascinating: the difficulty of differentiating “hard” AI from “soft” AI. I’m not worried about “hard” AI with genuine self awareness: being truly conscious, they’d develop concepts of morality on their own (in Trek terms, at best Data, at worst Lore, but something). “Soft” AI though, is just an unthinking weapon that can do things REALLY fast.
No, that is a very bad and dangerous assumption. There is absolutely no evidence that ASI would have or develop any sort of morality. Even if it did, its version of morality could be shockingly different and very bad for us. Maybe it decides that literally every life is important including insects, rats, etc. and treats humans as equivelant to cockroaches. Or maybe it decides that we aren't concious nor intelligent (from its perspective) thus morality doesn't even apply to us. Maybe it develops some very specific and bizzare take on morality and then forces humans to live in very specific (and potentially not pleasant) ways with 24/7 monitoring and no ability to resist. Or it could just be completely calculating and mechanistic, only factoring in its goals with no care to anything or anyone else. All those are possible and likely many alternatives. The subset that results in humans prospering is not larger.
I often wonder about the sentience of some sci-fi authors. They way some write about copying memories as backing up, you'd think they weren't even aware of the concept.
I love reading the early sci-fi authors to see how they thought the future would be. I am just starting a re-read of Asimov's "Foundation" because of Feral's video on it. In the first few pages it mentions an interstellar transport carrying mail. Mail!!! 🙂
Regarding the term "sentience", a fellow writer recently convinced me to start using the term "sapience" instead. Shortly after that, I encountered the following bit of dialog in a John Ringo novel: "Sentient means they feel stuff. The term is sapient, dummy!" Something like that. No offense, but I now realize these two words fit with the concept of a continuum.
Quite correct. I'm usually better about using the terms correctly. This book, like so much of popular usage, makes it easy to slip into using them interchangeably.
I reread this book once every couple of years. I started out doing it because it was a damn good horror story, and it scared me like few others. These days, it's more like a... bellweather, to see how my thoughts and opinions about consciousness, my own and others, have changed. That things where some people don't have an internal monologue scares the shit out of me.
It's worth remembering thet Watts acknowledges that research on consciousness has come a long way since Blindsight. He's spoken about how the 3rd book in the series has aspects based on current scientific consensus re consciousness directly contradicts some of the ideas in the 1st. Not to say its not still very fun and interesting, just out-of-date 😅
I've been of the opinion that Abstract Cognition, Communicative Emotion, and Extro/Introspective Analysis are the tri-partate structure of overall higher-level sapience (though only using sapience for lack of a better word). It's interesting what you get when you work through the process of increasing two at the expense of another. I think what Blindsight excels in exploring is this idea that there are tons of crab-evolution, paperclip-maximization, niches within the natural landscape of cognition, we're really only in one. There's quite a few books/short stories that explore this idea of simulated universes with different base mechanics to our own physical reality, but to me Blindsight is scary in the sense that it shows how we could end up share our meatspace with truly alien intelligences. It makes me wonder how effectively those other optimization strategies would iterate in a biological environment like natural evolution, are beings like Stretch and Clench even possible without artificial intervention? Also I think I need to go get a fMRI because for a good minute there I could hold both versions of the cube in my vision too. No sanguiphagic desires though, yet.
I would also HIGHLY recommend the Freeze-Frame Revolution by the same author. A team of humans accelerating into deep time at near-light speeds with a chimpanzee-level AI running the show.
I'm highly suspected to be on the spectrum myself and some of the themes in this video really spoke to me. For instance, the thing about seeing situations from multiple viewpoints at once, and the interpretation of emotional constructs as a threat to one's well-being.
I found the assertion that some people lack internal monologues rather unsettling. The Voices quickly reassured me with the observation that Feral was no doubt referring to people with mental problems. The poor souls.
Internal monologue is nothing like schizophrenic auditory hallucinations. It’s just an imagining. I know it is me and I am fully in control of it. The only time I can recall not having it was in the middle of combat, at that time all “thinking” felt completely automatic.
@@509Gman Joking aside I have the same experiential understanding. But does your being "fully in control of it" extend to reading a Socratic dialogue and hearing different voices for the two parties? Is that a useful auditory option that aids understanding? For me the answers are yes. Internal vocal processing is just one of many modes of thought. Aside from sparring in a gym I have thankfully never experienced combat. But if I play pinball or a fast-paced video game there is a similar shift in brain mode: there simply isn't enough time for vocal processing of the necessary actions. Likewise when I listen to one of Bach's inventions my experience is completely auditory, without vocalization or visualization, even though certain tonal relationships might catch my attention. After the fact I might well describe the piece as a parade of tonal geometries or try to communicate it with a written musical score but those are interpretative explanations after the fact, distinct from the actual experience. I've met people however for whom songs are often accompanied with unbidden abstract images. YMMV.
What I have to wonder is if Watts and Alastair Reynolds are competing to see which of them can write a novel with the most interesting ideas carried by the most unpleasant characters being unpleasant to each other. They're books are filled with challenging thoughts, but I want all the characters to die from early on in the story.
Vampires are one of the most overused, tedious, and clichéd elements in modern pop culture... but this novel managed to present a take on them was actually original, convincing, and scary. Bravo, Dr. Watts, bravo!
“ consciousness is a gradient“ AND “Some people do not have an inner monologue!” I’m almost surprised RUclips didn’t censor your video just for saying that. For the Record I agree with that sentiment! Day-to-day life among the NPC horde seems to confirm that.
Loving your channel, new subscriber here. GREAT scifi picks on here that deserve that second look and the more in depth discussion of themes you're giving them. Enemy Mine and Fatherland forum? Yes please
I'm going to have to give this book a try. The idea that many people, if not most, never achieve an awareness of others consciousness jives with the Bible's narrative of the Fall and it's consequences. To wit, we are all little gods while everyone else is a mere creature, existing only to fulfill or resist our divine will. I think the kids call it, "main character syndrome".
And if I might go further with another book recommendation, I'd suggest "The Darkness That Comes Before." This is the start of R. Scott Bakker's grimdark fantasy series that I found at the same time as Blindsight. Both deal heavily with consciousness and free will.
00:00 - "Jukka" is a Finnish name, so "J" is pronounced like "Y", so it is pronounced Yukka. It is also around the third most common male name in Finland, to the author's surprise when he visited a Finnish science-fiction convention.
Interestingly, that description of Zombies with an increasingly human emulation brings to mind the Demons in the Frieren anime/manga: "Demons are creatures that use words to hunt humans." They boil down to "What if mimics had human form and mannerisms instead of looking like a treasure chest". They hunt humans using language and (often) some useful physical trait, but have no capacity to understand what the words they use mean. One demon might only know that being fortunate enough to look like a human child, dressing in shabby clothes, and knows that saying "help me" to strangers will reliably bring it older and more helpless prey. Most of their kind kill humans without a shred of malice, although they seem to develop cruelty and malice more as they age and grow in power. They don't even have a society, but the older they get, the more likely they seem to be to work together like cats when it suits them. Frieren is a good story, still ongoing though, so there's no telling if it will manage to end as strong as it's been up to this point. Speaking of Cats, the "human-like zombies would be under an evolutionary pressure to become undetectable" concept in the example quoted from the book... I would like to propose (with tongue in cheek) that the quoted example makes a mistake in thinking that zombies would arrive at an imitation of human intelligence before changing their form to something less detectable, which they clearly did in early history: The Ancient Pharoahs were not mummified in death, but rather were zombies the whole time, actively pursuing the process of changing their form to resemble housecats. When the humans they kept as livestock rose up and overthrew their zombie masters, they sealed the undying monsters away in giant structures made of nothing but right angles, and the housecat-like zombies escaped, where they proliferate to this day, cultivating their brain infecting bacteria for the day they can resume their place as the apex predator of man and dwarf alike, their plans foiled only by the evolution of allergies.
Watts is a fantastic novelist, playing with great ideas, and someone who's really interesting. It would probably be a lot of fun to have a philosophical discussion with him. But when he gets spun up about something, he can be insufferable, which is why I had to quit his blog.
Thank you for delving into this novel which I've read and re-read several times, mainly because I always get something new from it (yes, I'm prepared to admit that sometimes I'm slow on the uptake). If there is one problem with Blindsight, and it's not a criticism, it's that there are so many ideas and concepts within its pages that I've never come across before anywhere else. Peter Watts must have a brain the size of a house, or like the Tardis. You mentioned one particular aspect that I have considered before but have shied away from, afraid of a slippery slope that might become obsessive. That's the question of self-awareness and empathy. How can anyone be sure that they have empathy? Perhaps that question answers itself by the very question. You'd only ask the question if you were self-aware? More to the point, how do I know/judge whether the man/woman next to me has empathy? When one looks at the minute by minute horrors that human beings inflict on other human beings then it's easy to wonder what the hell is going through the minds of these individuals (if anything at all). Should we be running regular screenings of whole populations using some analogue of the Voigt-Kampff device from Blade Runner? There are plenty of cold blooded killings and killers without introducing androids into the equation. If potential parents were empathy tested, would it stop even one child murder? I don't know. What I do know is there would be rioting in the streets over civil liberties etc. Sorry for going on, but I get distressed at hearing about sentences passed on people for revolting crimes and I ask myself ''Can we not stop this happening in the first place?''
In the anime Frieren creatures called Demons mimicked human behaviour in order to feed on humans. Frieren, a 1000 year old elf, understood this and whenever she came across a demon, she realised it was a non-sentient being, originally a plant like creature, which evolved into a human looking creature with the ability to communicate in order to eat humans. Most of the humans in Frieren’s world did not understand this and kept on giving them human like motives, which gave them the delusion you could negotiate with demon’s. In reality this was like a fly negotiating with a spider, in the end futile.
They are clearly sentient in the show. The demon sorceress she kills crys while dying with no one watching her to trick and the demons display arrogance and pride multiple times.
@@goatskin4487 You are correct there are points where the demons display anguish when they know they have lost and die, but whether this is true sentience or simply the cry of a non-sentient life form which is dying is debatable. From a character-arc point of view adding some emotion to the demons make them more relatable and there is example of this, especially when the demon displays pride. The same thing occurred with the Borg. The original Borg were a collective with no emotion, but this proved boring so the Borg queen was born. Its even debatable if the original Borg was sentient, although they certainly would of started as sentient. The Borg queen was clearly sentient. I have to go back to Frieren's original description of the demons, where she strong implied they have no sentience. They are on auto-pilot.
This story had one of the neatest interpretations of vampires I've encountered.
Way better than the ones in Twilight.
Yeah I dug it too
Peter Watts said that his in on the story was through being stuck on the 'wrong' panel at a sci-fi con. I think he might even have had to field a 'what if' question about Twilight vampires being real.
The whole towering thing grows out of coming up with the idea of variant humans (vampires are far closer to standard h. sapiens than chimps are) that were obliged to eat us (they don't produce all of the proteins they need) but adapting their prey being very slow to mature: there can't be many pre-farming humans in a given area. So there can't be many babies born in the range you can walk to. So you can't eat many of their parents without sending them extinct. Therefore the vampires have to learn how to slow their metabolism right down every once in a while. For a few /decades/. Conveniently enough time for people to have forgotten "when Steve got eaten by crazy long-limbed super-people", and just have legends from their grandparents about Naughty Steve, and the demons in the dark.
Slowing your metabolism right down sounds a lot like something suspended animation. And that sounds like one of those things sci-fi loves, so now we're off the races on why bringing back vampires has a solid advantage for newly fledgling space-faring species.
Peter Watts should have become far, far richer off that book.
@SomeOtherPooma His vision of vampires, and ability to make them plausible is one of the best things in that book, and Jukka Sarasti is arguably the most interesting character.
Siri just came across to me as being autistic.
@Green_Tea_Coffee everyone in the book seems a bit on the spectrum, and Jukka Sarasti is a meat puppet.
Quinn's ideas goes in depth about this book and the ideas in it too. Doesn't surprise me that many people don't or can't make the leap from "I think therefore I am." to "Those around me think there fore they are as I am.". I've worked in customer facing jobs most of my life and you can see it in the various ways different customers and employers treat employees.
If you work in a jail, you get to see what happens when someone doesn't make the leap AND isn't smart enough to realize they should pretend like they did anyways.
@@jerrycan1756 A very, very large fraction of the populace possesses neither. It is simply that they aren't driven to act to the point it brings down the societal hammer. They grasp nothing besides immediate impulse and reward, can think no more than one step ahead, but their offenses are small because causing direct harm is often hard. But we end up with the question of if recognizing this truth poisons our own humanity because 'those around me do not think therefore they are not as I am' can well be the death of compassion.
@@jerrycan1756 How so?
Seems to me many people are non-sapient and faking empathy. There's no reason to suppose all brains work alike, they are not the same and there are identifiable consistent differences between male and female and various races/ethnicities. Would never be politically correct to really seriously study this and indeed its the case we must pretend men and women are identical in cognitive functionality nowadays.
He has the most insightful takes on my favorite stories.
I also see Feral Historian i click, best channel i found all year
Same here 👌
I know right! I can't believe he doesn't have more followers, I saw one video and was hooked immediately
@@LordPickles03 I think it's because he doesn't really dress up his footage - it's just him discussing the topic. I remember I almost passed over him the first time because some part of me equated production value and content quality, but if you listen for more than a minute you realize it's good.
Yeah, I've been on a marathon session of catching up with his vids. Great insight and analysis with a touch of humor.
you should put down the channels and read a book. don't let this guy do it for you, he's not an honest historian or scholar.
I love Peter Watts. I owned a tiny bubblehead figurine of him which I keept in my left pocket at all times. When I was going through tough times, I kissed the bubblehead on the forehead and it gave me strength. Sadly, one day I was shot at in a robbery gone wrong, and the figurine took a bullet that was meant for me. "Do not be afraid", I remember it telling me, "Peter Watts is here" it said. The robbers then started speaking chinese, and their heads popped like balloons a few moments later. Afterwards, I searched all over the store for my little Peter, alas it was gone. Anyways, cool video
They're doing bobbleheads of authors now??
@@steampunkdesperado8999 He said bubblehead. According to my drill sergeant, our whole company was bubbleheads, so they can't be that uncommon.
@@11C1P Well that explains it!
So everyone is going to ignore the heads popping…
@@gumbilicious1 Pretty mundane - everyone knows that sci-fi author bubbleheads can speak words of power and emit microwave lasers from their eyes.
I see Feral Historian, I click
Hell Yeah
Yep
Yeah! Simply the best for me.
Found this channel a few months ago. His smartassery is top of the line and the pop culture scifi selections are perfect to my tastes over the years
He didn't even have to ring the bell for you
Empathy is an advantage. It allows us to anticipate the behavior of others.
Until it becomes weaponized by an infiltration specialist enemy group. Like has happened across the whole of western civilization.
Pathological altruism is going to be the end of civilization unless it is corrected against.
Empathy is an advantage, when used as weapon.*
Its not really an advantage in the Blindsight universe where the non conscious aliens have calculated all the possible behaviors others will exhibit.
@ Perhaps not there, but I would imagine people in the real universe can come up with some unpredictable stuff.
It can be simulated more efficiently that with the experience of empathy.
The slick easy charm of psychopaths is the best example of this.
Empathy makes people work together in ways empathy simulation doesn't though.
Self sacrifice is one form of it.
This was a trippy novel I was not nearly mentally equipped to sufficiently comprehend all its subtle complex details and wider philosophical implications when I first read it as a teenager.
Even now as an adult I find it helpful to listen to audio narrations of the story to mold over.
I'm freaked out just by summaries. I don't think I even finished *Starfish* .
I never read the book, but I've been struggling with the video essay on it presented here. OMG. Normally I don't like horror stories, but this seems like it's more of a psychological mindf**k. Love your userID, btw.
@@EGRJStarfish, indeed the whole rifters trilogy is well worth your time should you ever feel inclined to pick it up again
In university I actually had the "Synthesist" profession promoted to me by somebody who'd never heard of Peter Watts, while on an academic project. I can't be sure but I think the major it lines up with is "Intercultural communications" or maybe something with the word "Facilitators" and "Interdisciplinary Studies", but the gist of the role was that a project required cooperation between a specialized field of CS, a specialized field of MechE, a specialized field of sociology, and a specialized field of ecology, and this unique generalist person was there to set baseline communication parameters because these people were going to talk past each other all day otherwise using words and concepts that didn't even extend to the rest of their college/departments. They used graduated levels of abstraction to break down statements in a discussion.
It also occurs to me that this is the same role that was filled by the character Tom in the movie Office Space.
"Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the God-damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that?"
I forget if it was Heinlein or Asimov who felt at that time... 50 freaking years ago... That knowledge was getting too siloed and these kind of interlocutors would be necessary
@@PF2015 They're basically right. This is one of the things that the discipline of Systems Engineering deals with.
@@Green_Tea_Coffee Integration Specialist is actually a job.
@liwojenkins Yep!
There's a key insight in Blindsight that makes it worth a re-read if (like me) you didn't pick up on it for the first time. Siri himself is a metaphor for consciousness in his role on the crew: a synthesizer, a storyteller, unspecialized, and utterly unnecessary.
At least as described in this video, it seemed obvious to me that that was the point. No idea how obvious it is as read, however.
Ah, I always thought he wasn't really fitting in, thanks for that insight, might read it again
Blindsight has got to be one of my favourite books of all time!
Would love to see a video on its sequel Echopraxia too!
Feral Historian + Blindsight! ‘Nough said! Happy days!
Allegedly, Neill Blomkamp (visionary sci-fi director of _District 9_ and _Chappie),_ is (or was) working with Peter Watts himself on a film based around the resurrected "vampires" like Jukka Serasti from _Blindsight,_ possibly as a precursor to a later _Blindsight_ film in its own right, but more probably as a stand-alone existential sci-fi horror flick.
Needless to say, I hope he succeeds. The idea of a pharmaceutical corporation bringing back Man's most terrifying predator for profit in the hubristic expectation of total control and containment is a delicious thought, _a la Jurassic Park_ but with the theoretical hominid sociopaths that inspired our Uncanny Valley fight-fright-or-flight instinct.
I don't see Blomkamp getting the budget he'd need to do justice to a Blindsight adaptation, but a smaller film about the vampires could work on a more spartan budget.
@@Green_Tea_Coffee
I mean, they made the _Doom_ movie on shakier adaptive ground with a less reputable director, and (as its own thing detached from _Doom 3),_ it worked.
Chappie was horrible and I am still very mad that we got that instead of a sequel to District 9
@@Mr.Ambrose_Dyer_Armitage_Esq. Ehh. I wasn't a fan of the adaptations of DOOM. It's so weird to me that it's basically the simplest concept in the world, yet every time they try to make it into a movie they can't get it right.
@@Green_Tea_Coffee
_Doom: Annihilation_ was rubbish, the first one just needed to be all or mostly FPS scenes like the final sequence. It should've been a longer film, though, with more time to establish ambience, or a mini series. Shame they dropped the supernatural aspects, but it still remains a guilty pleasure of mine; saw it as a kid at a sleep over and it scared the ever living shlt out of me.
Hey man, glad to see your channel doing so well! I first came across your channel with the Cyberpunk 2077 Post-Capitalism video, and I binged your whole catalog... That really helped me out as I was going through some difficulties at the time... and thanks to your videos I had something to focus on other than woe is me... I was the guy that suggested STALKER to you... So, thank you, and keep up the good work! Happy holidays!!!
🤘😁🤙
Sometimes we all need a distraction.
I've been slowly playing through Stalker since then. Not much time for gaming lately, but there' definitely some things to talk about in there.
As a new subscriber I'd be delighted to see a stalker video, although I think a more than surface knowledge of the ideas developed there would be necessary
Its clearly fresh and great channel, great intellectual and though provoking talk about Scifi and other subjects with dash or real world stuff, when most of youtube
is so bland same old, same old lore videos, 10 things... or rage bait.
Blindsight was lit. Lit AF but muy depresso.
All of Peter Watts' novels are like that. Great world building, interesting philosophical content, lots of footnotes justifying his world building, but much like the fantasy world of Attack on Titan, I would not want to live there.
Echopraxia makes it even more depressing.
I've been subscribed since this channel had 300 subscribers and it's so incredible to see it grow like this. Thank you for keeping it up, Mr. Historian!
It's grown far beyond what I ever thought it would. Thanks for sticking around.
@feralhistorian The algorithm randomly showed me your Captain America video, and I've been catching up on everything else ever since.
I was never more glad in my life to know I was different when I learned that a lot of people don't have an internal dialogue... I was like "how is that even possible? How can you not be able to talk to yourself inside your mind? wtf"
Yeah, but it explains so much of the r*tard behavior normies exhibit. They're just stimulus-response machines with no recursion to correct themselves.
Agreed. Its difficult to comprehend being conscious without one.
Yeah I thought we all did that. The opposite seems creepy.
The idea that there are people that can't think without squishing all the concepts into those inadequate packages called 'words' is horrifying to me.
Don't get me wrong; words have a... permanence that non-word concepts don't, precisely because a lot of the interesting edges have been filed off. But mentally confined to words? Ick.
You wonder why some people can't seem to grasp future consequences... This could be a huge factor. I also couldn't fathom it. My internal monologue is the loudest voice I hear.
Idk I kind of would love that. "Oh man is the only feeling thing amongst the stars? Time to take the stars then, no moral implications, they don't even know they're alive when we burn em."
I mean, it is our birthright
It's why we were sent here in the first place
@victorkreig6089 Bro what are you even talking about
It's like the colonization of the Americas - the first one, the one that crossed the Bering Straight. As long as you don't plunder yourself to extinction, you can do whatever you want!
the problem is besting them
as portrayed, it would be very, very, very difficult, without, according to the book's logic, useage of men and machines who could think similarly
For while I thought I had a problem of not empathizing but eventually I figured out that I over empathized. I assumed people were just like me and had similar motivations, but figured out that, in many cases, my motivations are very different than other people.
For example, I don’t really care about social status, therefore I had a huge blind spot understanding the motivations of people heavily driven by status. I also have a very hard time lying, I take pains to say things without embellishing, most people naturally augment stories with very biased nuance without even realizing it.
Empathy is a tricky thing
The first 22 seconds of this video sounds like it's yelled at you from a shirtless guy on a street corner. Best RUclips channel.
This is more relevant than ever since ChatGPT came out in 2022 and RUclips has been SATURATED with autogenerated content. What really freaked me out was the point when Rorschach, itself a dumb AI “Chinese room” without true consciousness, is still…”interactive” enough to respond “oh, you think I’m one of those Chinese Rooms? I’m not!” …this is scarier to me than a hostile but conscious alien entity.
I've hit the point where any sort of video that has a professional narration with no emotional intonation, put together with AI or stock visuals gets an automatic thumbs down and the option "don't recommend this channel" selected. I imagine that within the next year, even those cues will become hard to pick up on, and I'll have to resort to only watching videos from content creators who actually appear onscreen, but even that isn't going to be a long-term guarantee.
Rorschach is not dumb at all. What they communicate with might be a chinese room, but the intelligence behind it is scarily smart and playing a game of first contact on many orders of magnitudes above us ape-brains. It's made a bit more clear in the sequel what is happening, but the ship AI talks about it a bit at the end of Blindsight.
@ ah, I haven’t read the sequel. Crud.
@@thedragondemands I need to re-read Echopraxia.
@@Green_Tea_Coffee This is where I'm at too. Eventually the uncanny valley will just be a plain.
Feral Historian analyzing one of my favorite sci-fi novels. This is like getting an early Christmas present!
You'd make a great mentor character in an elite sci-fi academy, with higher than average chances of surviving that role.
Looking rather sharp in that coat. I really enjoyed Blindsight and my girlfriend who is not a huge sci-fi reader found it fascinating. I look forward to seeing a video about Echopraxia at some point too. I love the way Peter Watts just floods the reader with all these constant complicated details. I keep thinking about the protagonist from Echopraxia at the beginning of the story doing some biology/zoology work out in the field and casually noting that his specimines are contaminated with fragments of old mundane human information. Like that they devoloped the technology to store files in the form of something comparable to dna but that it perhaps persists in the environment and now it has become a whole new category of pollutant.
Not only that but biohackers making grasshoppers that sets forest fires. And other human/AI/vamp made species polluting the genepool of the natural world. It's actually a hot topic today, like for example farming salmon stock escaping and breeding with natural local populations, which in extreme can cause extinction of the local genepool. I bet it's gonna get just as crazy as in Echopraxia as biotech matures even more.
That bit of the book was both really poignant, and a pretty good indicator of where things are headed, e.g. with plans to release self-replicating vaccines, or mosquitos that are coded to mate, but not breed with wild mosquitos.
I have been using Chat GPT to speed up my automation development, and also asking it for information. This novel very much comes to mind as interact with Chat GPT.
The Chinese Room analogy is spookily close to how an AI like Chat GPT actually works, current AI just has more rooms to filter the content through.
I loved the question regarding consciousness and disadvantage.
I think this idea was also played with in a short story by Isaac Asimov as well, with the upshot of it being that it turns out that consciousness is a disease, somewhat similar to cancer. I should probably look that story up again, I read it like 30 years ago.
He's out in shortsleeves in Montana, in December, to deliver a video essay. The man has grit.
It's just real warm this year man
I wonder if he and Jackson Crawford have ever run into each other while filming RUclips videos.
Could be his body just runs hotter than the average too.
Montana? I thought he was back East. He mentioned a locale in another video but I forget.
@@Me__Myself__and__I I could've sworn he said he was in the Dakotas.
You have successfully convinced me to read this book.
It helps that there is a creative commons version available to read on the internet.
Since after a certain point in our evolution, successful use of tools became the only significant driving force behind further evolution. It drove curiosity, social organization, language and most of all, abstract cognition. It impacted imparting knowledge to others as a social force and the need for better communication skills and the modification of curiosity into an early impulse in children to acquire knowledge. It accidentally spawned our conscious awareness as well. At least in some portion of the population. I point you to another Science Fiction story "No Fire Burns" written in 1959 by Avram Davidson, in which there's a research about humans in which "No fire burns" that are normal to all appearances but essentially like zombies, interacting with the world and society around them as non-introspective operators, motivated only by sociopathic needs and their early indoctrination oblivious to anything other than their programmed functions and needs being meet, fully reactive. It explains a great deal.
To add a wrinkle to the 'dangers of AI' talk that I think this topic touches. I'm reminded of a phrase that summed up the real dangers nicely - "I less concerned about an AI becoming 'like a human' than I am of people becoming 'like AIs'". What offloading and parallelizing one's creative intelligence to algorithms tends to do...
More on subject - I have never been able to bring myself to get into Blindsight. It's always been sold to me as this pillar of hard sci-fi. I can't take it seriously as that with the conceit of space vampires included. Feels like an immature contrivance along with the tone one of the crew of a first contact crew's dialogue referenced in this video. It all rubs me the wrong way.
Probably just a me problem. Curious if anyone else feels similarly.
Great vid as always, Feral. Merry Christmas. Catch you in a week if you're not taking it off for the holiday.
I too rolled my eyes at the first mention of "vampires", but they're honestly one of the best parts of the book. Watts is a biologist, and these vampires were born out of a pet project he undertook to try to find a plausible biological/evolutionary explanation for all the classic traits of the vampire. Reading all the different explanations he came up with was great fun. Plus the vampire captain, like all the other crew members, are ultimately there to reinforce the whole books theme about the value of sentience from different angles. I was actually impressed that the vampire wasn't just there for the "cool" factor but because it was another supporting pillar of the argument the book is laying out.
I thought the vampire thing was stupid at first, too, but Watts manages to pull it off. The dialog and characters are fine for the kind of book this is, but the way a lot of them talk and act, they come across to me as being autistic, except for Sarasti.
You could make the argument (and it's indirectly touched upon in the video) that the reason is that the vampire is, well... actually human.
As in, _we_ are the vampires, evolutionary speaking (as regards to intellect, and mental model, that is).@@Green_Tea_Coffee
Hands down this is my favorite Feral Historian video so far! Crossing my fingers for a part two and perhaps part 3 someday 🤞🤞
Consciousness being a gradient... now a hear it its something i have felt for decades...well thanks feral H, time for another existential crisis.
As a candidate crisis, have you heard that O3 was just released and absolutely CRUSHED the test specifically designed to measure general intelligence (ala AGI) that all of the other models failed at? It pretty clearly is AGI at this point, though moving the goalposts has already begun. AGI but not consious. Seems fitting for this video.
And, yes, it is just apparently a "happy accident" the the Apple AI is called "Siri". No relation. But the sort of thing that Scott Adams might say is "the Simulation winking at us.
And now I have another book on the list.
Sending this to my son, an astrobiologist. Something for him to ponder as he looks at gas clouds a hundred plus light years from here.
As a Type 1 Bipolar person this video struck a nerve but all your videos are great. Discovering "Prayer for the Roller Boys" alone was worth subscribing. I really enjoy all your old tapes and don't feel the need to comment since your analysis is so good.
The sequel to this book was fun, but I'm forever mad at the author for depriving our boy the MC from his Vamp wife. The book never adequately explained why none of the H-Saps ever found the vamps attractive.
Especially the scene where she performs a superhuman party trick in a room full of drunk as dogs college students, the reaction of everyone sobering up and not a single one giving a hoot type reaction was extremely unrealistic. Speaking as one myself if a girl can solve 3 rubik's cubes while somersaulting and can rip my head off with a pinkie finger, that's a jackpot.
Last time I was this early my wife was furious.
Peter Watts vampires is such a great interpretation i have come across for a while.
Why, Blindsight and Feral Historian! Truly, it must be Christmas!
Best channel I've found in ages!
Much love from Medford, Oregon
One of my new favourite channels covering one of my favourite novels? Splendid
Blindsight is my all time favorite novel, and you did an excellent review.
I think a good test of consciousness is spontaneous empathetic interaction with an inanimate object. Like the idea of a pet rock is a completely one way relationship with zero utility or social cues, so it'd be next to impossible for a non-conscious entity to develop on their own.
WILSON!
Not necessarily. A non-conscious entity with sufficient brute-force power can emulate consciousness perfectly, that's the entire crux of the discussion in the book about if consciousness even matters.
One of your subs shouted out your channel on nerdotic, so I’m here!
Feral Historian really should be on an episode of Friday Night Tights!
He should also do a collab with Whatifalthist.
Dont know if this will be seen but I genuinely appreciate these little, but intensely thought provoking videos.
Years in the military had me very locked into a way of thinking about how I see the world.
But as my children get older and I start calming down and really thinking about what kind of world they're going to be inherited from me I thank you Feral, this channel has become my pondering hour when I get a few moments of quiet time.
God ..I think I will have that Zima you keep going on about.
Thanks for the video and turning me on to this book. I’m two pages in and hooked!
I loved Blindsight and I have a feeling I'm about to love this short film - thanks for sharing that!
Best. Book. Ever. I think it’s beyond brilliant.
Honestly, I don’t use the phrase “life changing” lightly - and I don’t think I would use it for any other piece of media. But this book changed the way I look at the world. It’s hard, hard, hard science fiction and requires some real work to process, but it’s worth the effort. If you like Greg Egan, you’ll love Peter Watts. He has a lot of very good books but Blindsight is his best.
Can't wait for your review of the Gate anime!
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year.
Sentience versus sapience? I didn't expect this topic, but it's welcome.
This Chinese Room reminds me about video I saw long time ago.
English speaking tourist visited Asian country (don't remember exact one, probably Japan). He knew local language to some extent.
He foud a local snack shop run by a single woman. Location had a high number of tourists who mainly spoke English.
She couldn't learn English, but because the assortment of her shop was quite small (I think it was like a single specific food), she came up with an interesting solution.
She created a list of phrases that she could read to talk to tourists. It would appear like she could understand and speak English, but in reality she would just read an appropriate response to a phrase a tourist would say.
I wonder if Vampire World would end up being all that much different than what we have now. Remember, in an equilibrium state there aren't many of them, they can't stand to be around another vampire, and they need the baselines. A cannibal psychopath in the C-suite, odd rumors that never come to anything, among the baselines. People, a few, disappear, now and then and its never solved.
I'm rotating an apple in my head right now.
Now I am, too. Thanks.
I'm rotating the concept of an apple in mine...
Not sure if I am or if I only think I am or if I only think that I think I am.
Now I want an apple . . . or, at least I think I do?
But . . is it an apple or just the concept of an apple?
@@lacie5522 It's a whole bunch of conceptual ones.
How 'bout them apples.
"In Between Descartes Moments" would be the title if my life were a book.
I'm listening to audio version of Blindsight now, so this is really timely, thank you. I've had a hard time getting my head around what's happening, so it's good to get plot sanity check here. It seems to me the Chinese Room metaphor the main character brings up is very much like ChatGPT
The whole “Chinese room” concept is fascinating: the difficulty of differentiating “hard” AI from “soft” AI. I’m not worried about “hard” AI with genuine self awareness: being truly conscious, they’d develop concepts of morality on their own (in Trek terms, at best Data, at worst Lore, but something). “Soft” AI though, is just an unthinking weapon that can do things REALLY fast.
Trek is infantile in almost every concept it explores, I would not use it as a baseline
@@victorkreig6089 I just meant it as a familiar one
No, that is a very bad and dangerous assumption. There is absolutely no evidence that ASI would have or develop any sort of morality. Even if it did, its version of morality could be shockingly different and very bad for us. Maybe it decides that literally every life is important including insects, rats, etc. and treats humans as equivelant to cockroaches. Or maybe it decides that we aren't concious nor intelligent (from its perspective) thus morality doesn't even apply to us. Maybe it develops some very specific and bizzare take on morality and then forces humans to live in very specific (and potentially not pleasant) ways with 24/7 monitoring and no ability to resist. Or it could just be completely calculating and mechanistic, only factoring in its goals with no care to anything or anyone else. All those are possible and likely many alternatives. The subset that results in humans prospering is not larger.
YES YES YES YEEEEES.
I have been consciously waiting for this.
I often wonder about the sentience of some sci-fi authors. They way some write about copying memories as backing up, you'd think they weren't even aware of the concept.
I love reading the early sci-fi authors to see how they thought the future would be. I am just starting a re-read of Asimov's "Foundation" because of Feral's video on it. In the first few pages it mentions an interstellar transport carrying mail. Mail!!! 🙂
Regarding the term "sentience", a fellow writer recently convinced me to start using the term "sapience" instead. Shortly after that, I encountered the following bit of dialog in a John Ringo novel: "Sentient means they feel stuff. The term is sapient, dummy!" Something like that. No offense, but I now realize these two words fit with the concept of a continuum.
Quite correct. I'm usually better about using the terms correctly. This book, like so much of popular usage, makes it easy to slip into using them interchangeably.
@@feralhistorian It's cool, I've been saying "sentient" for years. :-)
I reread this book once every couple of years. I started out doing it because it was a damn good horror story, and it scared me like few others. These days, it's more like a... bellweather, to see how my thoughts and opinions about consciousness, my own and others, have changed.
That things where some people don't have an internal monologue scares the shit out of me.
It's worth remembering thet Watts acknowledges that research on consciousness has come a long way since Blindsight. He's spoken about how the 3rd book in the series has aspects based on current scientific consensus re consciousness directly contradicts some of the ideas in the 1st. Not to say its not still very fun and interesting, just out-of-date 😅
now i want to read the book! your vids are getting better and better!
I've been of the opinion that Abstract Cognition, Communicative Emotion, and Extro/Introspective Analysis are the tri-partate structure of overall higher-level sapience (though only using sapience for lack of a better word). It's interesting what you get when you work through the process of increasing two at the expense of another. I think what Blindsight excels in exploring is this idea that there are tons of crab-evolution, paperclip-maximization, niches within the natural landscape of cognition, we're really only in one. There's quite a few books/short stories that explore this idea of simulated universes with different base mechanics to our own physical reality, but to me Blindsight is scary in the sense that it shows how we could end up share our meatspace with truly alien intelligences. It makes me wonder how effectively those other optimization strategies would iterate in a biological environment like natural evolution, are beings like Stretch and Clench even possible without artificial intervention?
Also I think I need to go get a fMRI because for a good minute there I could hold both versions of the cube in my vision too. No sanguiphagic desires though, yet.
Awesome, one of my favorite youtubers, doing one of my favorite books :)
Great camera angle, frame, and lighting. Oh, and quality.
I am reading Dennett's intuition pumps right now and this video is an good companion.
I would also HIGHLY recommend the Freeze-Frame Revolution by the same author. A team of humans accelerating into deep time at near-light speeds with a chimpanzee-level AI running the show.
The other stories in the same ("Sunflowers") setting are kind of interesting too.
Captures us pretty well in a single sentence.
I’m autistic and got so excited hearing your review I had to stop in the middle. There is so much I feel driven to say about this and your insights
I'm highly suspected to be on the spectrum myself and some of the themes in this video really spoke to me. For instance, the thing about seeing situations from multiple viewpoints at once, and the interpretation of emotional constructs as a threat to one's well-being.
Watching your videos just give me a lot of new ideas for my writing seem like a cool dude
Peter Watts writing restored my faith in sf.
I found the assertion that some people lack internal monologues rather unsettling. The Voices quickly reassured me with the observation that Feral was no doubt referring to people with mental problems. The poor souls.
Internal monologue is nothing like schizophrenic auditory hallucinations. It’s just an imagining. I know it is me and I am fully in control of it. The only time I can recall not having it was in the middle of combat, at that time all “thinking” felt completely automatic.
@@509Gman Joking aside I have the same experiential understanding. But does your being "fully in control of it" extend to reading a Socratic dialogue and hearing different voices for the two parties? Is that a useful auditory option that aids understanding? For me the answers are yes.
Internal vocal processing is just one of many modes of thought. Aside from sparring in a gym I have thankfully never experienced combat. But if I play pinball or a fast-paced video game there is a similar shift in brain mode: there simply isn't enough time for vocal processing of the necessary actions.
Likewise when I listen to one of Bach's inventions my experience is completely auditory, without vocalization or visualization, even though certain tonal relationships might catch my attention. After the fact I might well describe the piece as a parade of tonal geometries or try to communicate it with a written musical score but those are interpretative explanations after the fact, distinct from the actual experience. I've met people however for whom songs are often accompanied with unbidden abstract images. YMMV.
@@509Gman You were probably taken over and used as a zombie!
What I have to wonder is if Watts and Alastair Reynolds are competing to see which of them can write a novel with the most interesting ideas carried by the most unpleasant characters being unpleasant to each other. They're books are filled with challenging thoughts, but I want all the characters to die from early on in the story.
My favorite RUclips literature analyst, making a video on my favorite book? What is this, Christmas?
Great video! I am torn between this and Lem's Solaris as my favourite first contact books.
Great video!
Vampires are one of the most overused, tedious, and clichéd elements in modern pop culture... but this novel managed to present a take on them was actually original, convincing, and scary. Bravo, Dr. Watts, bravo!
“ consciousness is a gradient“ AND “Some people do not have an inner monologue!” I’m almost surprised RUclips didn’t censor your video just for saying that. For the Record I agree with that sentiment! Day-to-day life among the NPC horde seems to confirm that.
i LOVE this book. please please please talk about echopraxia next
Loving your channel, new subscriber here. GREAT scifi picks on here that deserve that second look and the more in depth discussion of themes you're giving them. Enemy Mine and Fatherland forum? Yes please
I'm going to have to give this book a try. The idea that many people, if not most, never achieve an awareness of others consciousness jives with the Bible's narrative of the Fall and it's consequences. To wit, we are all little gods while everyone else is a mere creature, existing only to fulfill or resist our divine will. I think the kids call it, "main character syndrome".
That book is amazing, I highly recommend The Freeze-Frame Revolution as well.
Yeah I really need to get it over and finally finish reading it
Bought a copy a few years ago and been putting it off for other reasons
One of my favorite books of all time. It drop huge bombs every paragraph or so.
Brilliant as always.
And if I might go further with another book recommendation, I'd suggest "The Darkness That Comes Before." This is the start of R. Scott Bakker's grimdark fantasy series that I found at the same time as Blindsight. Both deal heavily with consciousness and free will.
Zima is what happens when Intelligence without consciousness exists.
So, basically what happens when you let the marketing department create a new drink and the brewers simply comply without thinking.
ROTFLMAO!
So is this book
“Non-sentient intelligence”. See also the G’baba in David Weber’s Safehold series.
00:00 - "Jukka" is a Finnish name, so "J" is pronounced like "Y", so it is pronounced Yukka. It is also around the third most common male name in Finland, to the author's surprise when he visited a Finnish science-fiction convention.
I was wondering about that. Noted for future reference.
I love this novel. Hard sci-fi 🔥
@Feral Historian A childhood favorite was Radix by A.A. Attanasio. Good future content piece, eh eh?
Interestingly, that description of Zombies with an increasingly human emulation brings to mind the Demons in the Frieren anime/manga: "Demons are creatures that use words to hunt humans."
They boil down to "What if mimics had human form and mannerisms instead of looking like a treasure chest". They hunt humans using language and (often) some useful physical trait, but have no capacity to understand what the words they use mean. One demon might only know that being fortunate enough to look like a human child, dressing in shabby clothes, and knows that saying "help me" to strangers will reliably bring it older and more helpless prey. Most of their kind kill humans without a shred of malice, although they seem to develop cruelty and malice more as they age and grow in power. They don't even have a society, but the older they get, the more likely they seem to be to work together like cats when it suits them.
Frieren is a good story, still ongoing though, so there's no telling if it will manage to end as strong as it's been up to this point.
Speaking of Cats, the "human-like zombies would be under an evolutionary pressure to become undetectable" concept in the example quoted from the book... I would like to propose (with tongue in cheek) that the quoted example makes a mistake in thinking that zombies would arrive at an imitation of human intelligence before changing their form to something less detectable, which they clearly did in early history: The Ancient Pharoahs were not mummified in death, but rather were zombies the whole time, actively pursuing the process of changing their form to resemble housecats.
When the humans they kept as livestock rose up and overthrew their zombie masters, they sealed the undying monsters away in giant structures made of nothing but right angles, and the housecat-like zombies escaped, where they proliferate to this day, cultivating their brain infecting bacteria for the day they can resume their place as the apex predator of man and dwarf alike, their plans foiled only by the evolution of allergies.
There are real people that don't have inner monologues? Now you've sprained my brain.
Always a great video
I've been reading Peter Watt's blog for years. The cadence, the cynical wit, the way you speak actually reminds me a lot of his style.
Watts is a fantastic novelist, playing with great ideas, and someone who's really interesting. It would probably be a lot of fun to have a philosophical discussion with him.
But when he gets spun up about something, he can be insufferable, which is why I had to quit his blog.
can i ask did you play sid meier's alpha centauri or have a plan to make a video about this game?
13:25 is an apt descriptor for the plot of System Shock.
Sounds like a good read, I'll have to check it out.
I'm going to need to watch this a watch this a few more times to really get it
The book he's talking about is basically like that, as well.
Oh damn, feral historian does *blindsight*?! Two great tastes...
Thank you for delving into this novel which I've read and re-read several times, mainly because I always get something new from it (yes, I'm prepared to admit that sometimes I'm slow on the uptake).
If there is one problem with Blindsight, and it's not a criticism, it's that there are so many ideas and concepts within its pages that I've never come across before anywhere else. Peter Watts must have a brain the size of a house, or like the Tardis.
You mentioned one particular aspect that I have considered before but have shied away from, afraid of a slippery slope that might become obsessive. That's the question of self-awareness and empathy. How can anyone be sure that they have empathy? Perhaps that question answers itself by the very question. You'd only ask the question if you were self-aware? More to the point, how do I know/judge whether the man/woman next to me has empathy? When one looks at the minute by minute horrors that human beings inflict on other human beings then it's easy to wonder what the hell is going through the minds of these individuals (if anything at all).
Should we be running regular screenings of whole populations using some analogue of the Voigt-Kampff device from Blade Runner? There are plenty of cold blooded killings and killers without introducing androids into the equation. If potential parents were empathy tested, would it stop even one child murder? I don't know. What I do know is there would be rioting in the streets over civil liberties etc.
Sorry for going on, but I get distressed at hearing about sentences passed on people for revolting crimes and I ask myself ''Can we not stop this happening in the first place?''
Perhaps the most important question is whether the effects of stopping it are worse than the event you're trying to stop.