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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3652 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 2, 2023

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Recently read Blindsight and it's sequel Echopraxia, and was immediately struck with flashbacks to Eclipse Phase; apparently Blindsight was a big inspiration for the game.

Blindsight has aged incredibly well for sci-fi from pre-2010. I highly recommend reading it; it's freely available, the audiobook is good, and it even has a short film that functions as a trailer https://youtube.com/watch?v=VkR2hnXR0SM

(The events of the book are presented in reverse order in the trailer).

Blindsight was a bit tough for me to get into. I think Watts went a touch too abstract with his plot and it was something I felt I had to force myself to finish.

On the other hand, Solaris by Lem conveyed the same idea of the absolute alien nature of non-human intelligence in a very evocative and beautiful way.

I think I'm about due for a reread of Blindsight - I read it years ago online and loved it, but at the time I hadn't read much about consciousness. My (vague) recollection was that it mostly elides the hard problem of consciousness. I remember there was an idea that the crew's linguist was able to prove the non-consciousness of the aliens from their text communications.

In the era of LLMs, that seems pretty silly, since ChatGPT (or at least the un-neutered Bing) can do a great job of pretending to experience. But maybe there was less hand-waving than I'm remembering?

I remember there was an idea that the crew's linguist was able to prove the non-consciousness of the aliens from their text communications.

IIRC (and it's been over a decade, so take it with a grain of salt), they were able to prove that the aliens' communications and actions were separate. They used the Chinese Room analogy after discovering that "threats" weren't matched with aiming weapons, "negotiations" weren't matched with fulfilling the terms, etc. I don't think that would prove non-consciousness (and I can't remember if they claimed that), but it's certainly a step in that direction.

They figured out whatever they were communicating with initially was a chatbot made from intercepted human communications

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