As in Bruce Sterling's "Swarm," and some of Stephen Baxter's work (such as the grand Evolution), the value of consciousness itself is questioned. Control is an illusion, after all: think about moving your arm, and your arm will already be in motion. We exist after the fact -- or, as Siri's friend Pag puts it, "We're not thinking machines, we're -- we're feeling machines that happen to think."
We are observers, not agents, and where's the survival advantage in that? Watts's aliens, certainly, think rings around his humans and posthumans. They can detect the electromagnetic fluctuations of a human brain, and rewire them in real time. They can time their movements so precisely as to hide in the saccades of our eyes. And they can do it, in part, because they are not conscious, because consciousness is expensive: "I wastes energy and processing power, self-obsesses to the point of psychosis [...] They turn your own cognition against itself. They travel between the stars. This is what intelligence can do, unhampered by self-awareness," is Sarasti's blunt assessment. We are a fluke, a mistake; in evolutionary terms, a dead end. Once we get beyond the surface of our planet we are not fit.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Bookslut | Blindsight by Peter Watts
Nice discussion of Watts's Blindsight, including comparisons to other works on similar themes: Bookslut | Blindsight by Peter Watts:
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Monday, February 6, 2012
Monday, November 14, 2011
Why an omniscient foe will always lose a game of chicken
Why an omniscient foe will always lose a game of chicken:
Find out how omniscience can let one opponent make a chump of another in one paradoxical game but get completely trounced in another. Game theory at its weirdest, folks.
Monday, November 7, 2011
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
The Most Horrifying "Crawling Over a Pile of Your Dead Alternate Selves" Scene Ever Filmed
From io9.com: The Most Horrifying "Crawling Over a Pile of Your Dead Alternate Selves" Scene Ever Filmed:
The clip actually comes from 2009's Triangle, which I'd actually thought was just a standard "trapped on a boat with a killer" movie, with a bit of weirdness here and there. The movie starts out that way, and then turns into a trippy film about a time-loop in which a woman keeps running into her slasher self from another version of the loop. (That's Jess, watching her alternate self kill another alternate self in the clip above.)
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Vernor Vinge’s Children of the Sky: bootstrapping high-tech civilization from hive-mind Machiavellis – Boing Boing
In this, the humans are aided by the Tines, a race of doglike hive-intelligences. Three or more Tines come together and form a collective consciousness, synchronizing with high-speed, ultrasonic chirps. A literal society of minds, the Tines are essentially immortal -- they need merely replace injured or killed individuals with new members. But the Tines are sorely limited in ways as well: if two Tines get to close to one another, their "mindsounds" will mingle, and their consciousness dissolve. Adding new Tines to a pack-individual can change its identity, sometimes creating new and unrecognizable packs.
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