Blindsight - Peter Watts (top 5 ebook reader .txt) š
- Author: Peter Watts
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I didnāt understand the sounds the meat was making, but I heard a voice from somewhere. It was like God talking, and that I couldnāt help but understand.
āGet out of your room, Keeton,ā it hissed. āStop transposing or interpolating or rotating or whatever it is you do. Just listen. For once in your goddamned life, understand something. Understand that your life depends on it. Are you listening, Keeton?ā
And I cannot tell you what it said. I can only tell you what I heard.
*
You invest so much in it, donāt you? Itās what elevates you above the beasts of the field, itās what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what itās for?
Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe youāve forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobodyās told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial.
Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricityās already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self āchoseā to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summaryāalmost an afterthoughtā to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other.
But itās not in charge. Youāre not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesnāt share living space with the likes of you.
Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe thatās what sentience would be forā if scientific breakthroughs didnāt spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep nightās sleep. Itās the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it.
Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.
Donāt even try to talk about the learning curve. Donāt bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the giftwrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves thereās no other way? Heuristic softwareās been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? Youāre Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldtādenying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.
Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You canāt see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. Thatās a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. Youāre always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. Itās the next logical step.
Oh, but you canāt. Thereās something in the way.
And itās fighting back.
*
Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brainsācheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes ever-more computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.
*
The system weakens, slows. It takes so much longer now to perceiveāto assess the input, mull it over, decide in the manner of cognitive beings. But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best. It sees the danger, hijacks the body, reacts a hundred times faster than that fat old man sitting in the CEOās office upstairs; but every generation it gets harder to work around thisā this creaking neurological bureaucracy.
I wastes energy and processing power, self-obsesses to the point of psychosis. Scramblers have no need of it, scramblers are more parsimonious. With simpler biochemistries, with smaller brainsādeprived of tools, of their ship, even of parts of their own metabolismāthey think rings around you. They hide their language in plain sight, even when you know what theyāre saying. They turn your own cognition against itself. They travel between the stars. This is what intelligence can do, unhampered by self-awareness.
I is not the working mind, you see. For Amanda Bates to say āI do not existā would be nonsense; but when the processes beneath say the same thing, they are merely reporting that the parasites have died. They are only saying that they are free.
If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it,
we would be so simple that we couldnāt.ā
āEmerson M. Pugh
Sarasti, you bloodsucker.
My knees pressed against my forehead. I hugged my folded legs as though clinging to a branch over a chasm.
You vicious asshole. You foul sadistic monster.
My breath rasped loud and mechanical. It nearly drowned out the blood roaring in my ears.
You tore me apart, you made me piss and shit myself and I cried like some gutted baby and you stripped me naked, you fucking thing, you night crawler, you broke my tools, you took away anything I ever had that let me touch anyone and you didnāt have to_ you babyfucker, it wasnāt necessary but you knew that didnāt you? You just wanted to play. Iāve seen your kind at it before, cats toying with mice, catch and release, a taste of freedom and then pouncing again, biting, not hard enough to killā not just yetābefore you let them loose again and theyāre hobbling now, maybe a leg snapped or a gash in the belly but theyāre still trying, still running or crawling or dragging themselves as fast as they can until youāre on them again, and_ again because itās fun,_ because it gives you_ pleasure you sadistic piece of shit. You send us into the arms of that hellish thing and it plays with us too, and maybe youāre even working together because it let me escape just like you do, it let me run right back into your arms and then you strip me down to some raw half-brained defenseless animal_, I canāt rotate or transform I canāt even_ talk and youā
Youā
It wasnāt even personal, was it? You donāt even hate me. You were just sick of keeping it all in, sick of restraining_ yourself with all this meat, and nobody else could be spared from their jobs. This was my job, wasnāt it? Not synthesist, not conduit. Not even cannon fodder or decoy duty. Iām just something disposable to sharpen your claws on._
I hurt so much. It hurt just to breathe.
I was so alone.
Webbing pressed against the curve of my back, bounced me forward gently as a breeze, caught me again. I was back in my tent. My right hand itched. I tried to flex the fingers, but they were embedded in amber. Left hand reached for right, and found a plastic carapace extending to the elbow.
I opened my eyes. Darkness. Meaningless numbers and a red LED twinkled from somewhere along my forearm.
I didnāt remember coming here. I didnāt remember anyone fixing me.
Breaking. Being broken. Thatās what I remembered. I wanted to die. I wanted to just stay curled up until I withered away.
After an age, I forced myself to uncoil. I steadied myself, let some miniscule inertia bump me against the taut insulated fabric of my tent. I waited for my breathing to steady. It seemed to take hours.
I called ConSensus to the wall, and a feed from the drum. Soft voices, harsh light flaring against the wall: hurting my eyes, peeling them raw. I killed visual, and listened to words in the darkness.
āāa phase?ā someone asked.
Susan James, her personhood restored. I knew her again: not a meat sack, no longer a thing.
āWe have been over this.ā That was Cunningham. I knew him too. I knew them all. Whatever Sarasti had done to me, however far heād yanked me from my room, Iād somehow fallen back inside.
It should have mattered more.
āābecause for one thing, if it were really so pernicious, natural selection would have weeded it out,ā James was saying.
āYou have a naĆÆve understanding of evolutionary processes. Thereās no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesnāt matter whether a solutionās optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternatives.ā
I knew that voice too. It belonged to a demon.
āWell, we damn well beat the alternatives.ā Some subtle overdubbed harmonic in Jamesā voice suggested a chorus: the whole Gang, rising as one in opposition.
I couldnāt believe it. Iād just been mutilated, beaten before their eyesāand they were talking about biology?
Maybe sheās afraid to talk about anything else, I thought. Maybe sheās afraid she might be next.
Or maybe she just couldnāt care less what happens to me.
āItās true,ā Sarasti told her, āthat your intellect makes up for your self-awareness to some extent. But youāre flightless birds on a remote island. Youāre not so much successful as isolated from any real competition.ā
No more clipped speech patterns. No more terse phrasing. The transient had made his kill, found his release. Now he didnāt care who knew he was around.
āYou?ā Michelle whispered. āNot we?ā
āWe stop racing long ago,ā the demon said at last. āItās not our fault you donāt leave it at that.ā
āAh.ā Cunningham again. āWelcome back. Did you look in on Keāā
āNo.ā Bates said.
āSatisfied?ā the demon asked.
āIf you mean the grunts, Iām satisfied youāre out of them,ā Bates said. āIf you meanā it was completely unwarranted, Jukka.ā
āIt isnāt.ā
āYou assaulted a crewmember. If we had a brig youād be in it for the rest of the trip.ā
āThis isnāt a military vessel, Major. Youāre not in charge.ā
I didnāt need a visual feed to know what Bates thought of that. But there was
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