Blindsight Watts novel
Channel: the aleatoric learning channel
Date: 2022-01-02

Blindsight_Watts_novel:
The novel explores questions of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, game theory as well as evolution and biology. The crew explore questions of identity, the nature, utility and interdependence of intelligence and consciousness. Helen Keeton, Siri's mother, whose consciousness has been connected, brain in a vat style, to a virtual utopia called "Heaven". The exploration of consciousness is the central thematic element of Blindsight. The novel raises questions about the essential character of consciousness. Is the interior experience of consciousness necessary, or is externally observed behavior the sole determining characteristic of conscious experience? Is an interior emotional experience necessary for empathy, or is empathic behavior sufficient to possess empathy? Relevant to these questions is a plot element near the climax of the story, in which the vampire captain is revealed to have been controlled by the ship's artificial intelligence for the entirety of the novel. Philosopher John Searle's Chinese room thought experiment is used as a metaphor to illustrate the tension between the notions of consciousness as an interior experience of understanding, as contrasted with consciousness as the emergent result of merely functional non-introspective components. Blindsight contributes to this debate by implying that some aspects of consciousness are empirically detectable. Specifically, the novel supposes that consciousness is necessary for both aesthetic appreciation and for effective communication. The possibility is raised that consciousness is, for humanity, an evolutionary dead end. The alien creatures encountered by the crew of the Theseus themselves lack consciousness. The necessity of consciousness for effective communication is illustrated by a passage from the novel in which the linguist realizes that the alien creatures can't be conscious because of their lack of semantic understanding: "Tell me more about your cousins," Rorschach sent.

keywords: novel, refreshing, Siri, consciousness, humanity, Rorschach, man, Theseus, human, Word, intelligence, crew, Blindsight, word

the aleatoric learning channel
2022-01-02 15:49:20.960958