Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

Theseus’s fabrication plant could build everything from cutlery to cockpits. Give it a big enough matter stockpile and it could have even built another Theseus, albeit in many small pieces and over a very long time. Some wondered if it could build another crew as well, although we’d all been assured that was impossible. Not even these machines had fine enough fingers to reconstruct a few trillion synapses in the space of a Human skull. Not yet, anyway. I believed it. They would never have shipped us out fully assembled if there’d been a cheaper alternative.

I could tell from the way his fingers moved that his favorite color was green.

Watching the world from a distance, it occurred to me at last: I knew exactly what Chelsea had meant, with her Luddite ramblings about desaturated Humanity and the colorless interactions of virtual space. I’d known all along. I’d just never been able to see how it was any different from real life.

Not even the most heavily armed police state can exert brute force on all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.

She reveled in her own inconsistency: a woman whose professional machinery edited thought itself, yet mistrustful of the dehumanizing impact of telephones.

“On the other hand,” Szpindel said, “technology implies belligerence.”

Cunningham lost most of his gender pronouns to an unforeseen glitch during the work on his temporal lobe.

“Life isn’t either/or. It’s a matter of degree.”

“Apparently the same thing can happen to the other senses, too,” she told me. “You can have blindtouch, and blindsmell, and blindhearing…” “That would be deafness.” She shook her head. “But it isn’t really, is it? Any more than blindsight is really blindness. Something in your head is still taking it all in. Something in the brain is still seeing, and hearing, even if you’re not—aware of it. Unless someone forces you to guess, or there’s some threat. You just get a really strong feeling you should move out of the way, and five seconds later a bus drives over the spot you were standing. You knew it was coming, somehow. You just don’t know how you knew.”

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default. Rorschach does nothing to you that you don’t already do to yourselves.”

I really wanted to talk to her. I just couldn’t find an algorithm that fit.

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can’t see both aspects of the Necker cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That’s a pretty half-assed way to parse reality.