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Personally, it's Stross' "Vile Offspring" in Accelerando that I'm seeing vividly manifest themselves.
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Feb 15, 2024 07:22
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Deptfordx posted:Re: Foundryside trilogy This is pretty much how I felt with the trilogy as well- ended up not making it through the last books. It felt like the focus of the world had been changed and the stakes raised enough that what I liked about the first book was mostly gone. E: fermun posted:To not offend the sponsors, is the suspicion from that member of the nomination committee From the article it does sound like potentially there was censorship of the Chinese entries as well- It cites this now deleted post apparently from a Chinese govt agency but is not sure what it reflects exactly: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12pK_UubEbByYql1NlEBybnQT-9YczW1j/view?usp=drivesdk (Not to excuse the administrators, wild) tildes fucked around with this message at 07:55 on Feb 15, 2024 |
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Feb 15, 2024 07:34
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General Battuta posted:It takes the idea that aliens might be unimaginable and incomprehensible seriously, but instead of throwing up its hands and casting Lovecraft, it uses science to pick a spot in the phase space of possible alien cognitions and say "well, this is deeply nonhuman, what would it be like to meet?" this is what all first-contact SF should aspire to. why would you want to read about humans meeting for the first time humans-but-with-cat-ears?
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Feb 15, 2024 07:42
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redleader posted:this is what all first-contact SF should aspire to. why would you want to read about humans meeting for the first time humans-but-with-cat-ears? Because chanur owns is why
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Feb 15, 2024 07:54
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I think people might be using sociopath when they mean psychopath. Sociopaths are mostly just stupid assholes and petty criminals and not 'You are an object to them' types.
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Feb 15, 2024 09:35
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Rain Brain posted:
Are there audio versions of that series? I've never seen them.
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Feb 15, 2024 11:51
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StrixNebulosa posted:Holy cannoli. So - since I realized I was never going to actually read Blindsight (despite liking Peter Watts' Starfish) all the way through, I sat down and read its wikipedia article and.... wait. The big twist of the novel is that Watts is straight up stealing the plot twist from Brian M Stableford's David Lydyard trilogy? what do you mean by this? i'm unable to find any decent plot summaries of the stableford stuff but even still, none of them mention conciousness in any way TOOT BOOT posted:I think people might be using sociopath when they mean psychopath. Sociopaths are mostly just stupid assholes and petty criminals and not 'You are an object to them' types. neither sociopath or psychopath are technical terms and the distinction is largely vibes
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Feb 15, 2024 12:03
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General Battuta posted:
Well except that the alien motivation is a huge cliche of consuming everything, so ultimately they’re predictable like rabies is predictable. Humans always assume anything different to them can’t possibly think like them, so this is really old hat first contact. That it happens to be true in this case probably doesn’t change anything meaningful. I think the book is most effective as-is, but it would have been more alien if there was mutual incomprehension or lack of interest. If the aliens/magic llm had never worked out what the words were in the signal it would be more convincingly alien, or if they’d completely ignored humans rather than what they did with the blinks etc.
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Feb 15, 2024 12:14
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Cacto posted:Well except that the alien motivation is a huge cliche of consuming everything, so ultimately they’re predictable like rabies is predictable. Humans always assume anything different to them can’t possibly think like them, so this is really old hat first contact. That it happens to be true in this case probably doesn’t change anything meaningful. I'm not sure that's the scrambler motivation? Their motivation isn't to blindly consume but to nullify a specific threat, like if someone slipped a bitcoin miner into your operating system -- whatever their transmissions are, they're just taking up time and energy. The other element is that Rorschach can think 'like' a human and played everyone like a puppet from the very beginning. The humans preferring to believe that it's a dumb system that is mimicking them like a Chinese Room and drew a name from a random ship is an example of that. I'd argue that incomprehension is a big theme of Blindsight and that no one in the book, even extending to humanity and the aliens on a broader level, is able to comprehend each other and everyone makes a whole lot of assumptions that don't help anyone. And arguably, given Siri's whole thing, it's likely that Blindsight posits that no one can even comprehend themselves in totality, either.
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Feb 15, 2024 12:52
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:And arguably, given Siri's whole thing, it's likely that Blindsight posits that no one can even comprehend themselves in totality, either. We are after all a composite of unthinking scramblers of our own
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Feb 15, 2024 13:28
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I'm not sure that's the scrambler motivation? Their motivation isn't to blindly consume but to nullify a specific threat, like if someone slipped a bitcoin miner into your operating system -- whatever their transmissions are, they're just taking up time and energy.
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Feb 15, 2024 13:46
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Having only a passing understanding of Blindsight and it's plot... what's the deal with the vampires and them ending the book wiping out humanity? How does that tie into the themes?
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Feb 15, 2024 13:54
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redleader posted:this is what all first-contact SF should aspire to. why would you want to read about humans meeting for the first time humans-but-with-cat-ears? You should read more CJ Cherryh.
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Feb 15, 2024 13:56
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PriorMarcus posted:Having only a passing understanding of Blindsight and it's plot... what's the deal with the vampires and them ending the book wiping out humanity? How does that tie into the themes? That's setup for Echopraxia, which takes place in the Solar system ~concurrently with Blindsight. It's even more of a "read it twice to understand anything about it" book, but I liked it a lot on my second time through.
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Feb 15, 2024 14:16
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PriorMarcus posted:Having only a passing understanding of Blindsight and it's plot... what's the deal with the vampires and them ending the book wiping out humanity? How does that tie into the themes? The vampires are an obligate carnivore predatory relative of early humanity, and they're nonconscious like the scramblers. We brought them back Jurassic Park style to do uhhh spreadsheets or something but their cognitive advantages and complete disinterest in being plugged into virtual reality heaven let them, rather predictably, get one over on us
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Feb 15, 2024 14:21
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Ravenfood posted:You should read more CJ Cherryh. Everybody should read more CJ Cherryh.
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Feb 15, 2024 14:36
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fritz posted:Everybody should read more CJ Cherryh.  Although it turns out my wife really disliked The Pride of Chanur; for her the Hani occupied a sort of uncanny valley of alien-ness where it would have been fine if they were "humans with cat ears", or if they were more alien like the kif or tc'a, but their nature as "space lions" really grated for her in a way that basically ruined the book. She is considering reading more Cherryh this year, though, either something with no aliens in it (maybe one of the A-U books) or something with really hosed up aliens (Voyager in Night). General Battuta posted:Compare to Foreigner, which has a similar 'aliens are fundamentally built different' philosophical premise but which gets most of its appeal from being a fantasy of manners starring an angry little bottom who has to endure great suffering in a land of unpredictable and dangerous tops. It's a book About First Contact, but it's also about a guy who can't get a laptop charger and has to go on long horse rides because he's stuck in a Ruritanian romance. Also, as a Foreigner enjoyer, thank you for this delightful description of it.
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Feb 15, 2024 15:03
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fez_machine posted:We are after all a composite of unthinking scramblers of our own Right, this is the bit I think a lot of people who think the premise is completely stupid don't really contend with. I'm neutral on whether consciousness is actually inherently wasteful. But it's hard to deny that many of the things "I" do happen outside the locus of my consciousness. How do I turn light hitting my eyeballs into pictures? (The neurological mechanics of vision are particularly fascinating if you've never read about them, by the by) Or sound waves into noise? If I want to speak, or walk, or dance, "I" don't engage in the movement of individual muscles or motor neurons. I am good enough at mental math that, for simpler stuff, I don't have any conscious sense of "doing" anything, the answer just arrives without apparent effort. It's hard (for me at least) to escape the sense that the self is just running herd over a lot of little scramblers doing their own thing without my direct oversight. How important is that loop of self-awareness in that whole process? I don't know. I certainly like it, and I think I would prefer a universe where it was the norm, but I'm not confident of its necessity. I'm not worried about p-zombies in the real world except in the metaphorical way that Battuta talked about. Danhenge fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Feb 15, 2024 |
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Feb 15, 2024 15:16
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General Battuta posted:The vampires are an obligate carnivore predatory relative of early humanity, and they're nonconscious like the scramblers. We brought them back Jurassic Park style to do uhhh spreadsheets or something but their cognitive advantages and complete disinterest in being plugged into virtual reality heaven let them, rather predictably, get one over on us We brought them back because we needed to figure out their hibernation biology for space travel. I think people get hung up on the vampires like it's Lestat running Theseus, when actually they are much closer to alien creepy than vampire creepy. The more baffling and inconceivable to me an alien is the more interesting I find it. I do believe that life elsewhere in the universe is going to be so different as to be inconceivable to the human imagination, but since all sci fi is conceieved by human imagination I'll settle for aliens that are inconceivable just to my imagination. Who do you guys like for those types of aliens? Like Brin's uplift universe is full of cool aliens, but they're all pretty conceivable.
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Feb 15, 2024 17:42
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The difficulty I have with the idea that consciousness is an evolutionary dead end is that its been wildly successful on earth across a range of animals. I strongly suspect theoretical p-zombies would simply fail to survive due to lack of self-preservation instinct.
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Feb 15, 2024 17:49
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consciousness being a dead end kinda requires you to buy into the assumption that only humans' sort of consciousness counts. Otherwise you run into the fact that all of the most successful animals on earth exhibit consciousness or eusociality.
Terrible Opinions fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Feb 15, 2024 |
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Feb 15, 2024 18:06
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I am more or less always disappointed in the alienness of aliens, it's my main gripe with the Becky Chambers novels, they're very surface level differences. That's not a swing at her, I can't come up with better ones, I just want Weird aliens. Solaris, Pattern Jugglers from Revelation Space, and Arrival are maybe the best examples I've found but it's mostly because they're all very, very unexplained. The cheela from Dragon's Egg are biologically really weird but otherwise very human in how they act and react to things, things like The Thing/Blob are deeply alien and unknowable but it's hard to get deeper into them because of the nature of them. The Scramblers from Blindsight are kind of my top 'weird' aliens because the idea of a race of p-zombies is new and I liked the thing where they could identify and move between the timing of an eye performing saccades and other tricks that use our biology against us. For mostly just culturally different aliens, I liked Culture Minds, Oankali from Lilith's Brood, and the Essiel from Final Architecture, though the Essiel kinda fit into the 'very unexplained' category I still think it worked well.
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Feb 15, 2024 18:15
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Yngwie Mangosteen posted:I am more or less always disappointed in the alienness of aliens, it's my main gripe with the Becky Chambers novels, they're very surface level differences. That's not a swing at her, I can't come up with better ones, I just want Weird aliens. Solaris, Pattern Jugglers from Revelation Space, and Arrival are maybe the best examples I've found but it's mostly because they're all very, very unexplained. The cheela from Dragon's Egg are biologically really weird but otherwise very human in how they act and react to things, things like The Thing/Blob are deeply alien and unknowable but it's hard to get deeper into them because of the nature of them. The Scramblers from Blindsight are kind of my top 'weird' aliens because the idea of a race of p-zombies is new and I liked the thing where they could identify and move between the timing of an eye performing saccades and other tricks that use our biology against us. Have you read Embassytown by China Mieville? It has aliens that are…very alien.
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Feb 15, 2024 18:25
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Terrible Opinions posted:consciousness being a dead end kinda requires you to buy into the assumption that only humans' sort of consciousness counts. Otherwise you run into the fact that all of the most successful animals on earth exhibit consciousness or eusociality. Maybe there are degrees of consciousness that I'm not aware of but the sine qua non of "consciousness" imo is self-recognition. Animals are not self-aware.
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Feb 15, 2024 18:26
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zoux posted:Animals are not self-aware. How do you interpret the mirror test results?
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Feb 15, 2024 18:35
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Like just provably several types of corvids, elephants, and most of the great apes pass any test you can give for self-recognition. Dolphins have recognizable names for each-other. You have to presuppose a specialness of humans for this not to count.
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Feb 15, 2024 18:37
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buffalo all day posted:Have you read Embassytown by China Mieville? It has aliens that are…very alien. Perdido Street and The Scar also have some pretty out there beings. Not “aliens”, I guess, but definitely weird. A coworker recommended Perdido Street to me, and I remember her brightly saying ”You should read it! There’s bug sex!”.
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Feb 15, 2024 18:37
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buffalo all day posted:Have you read Embassytown by China Mieville? It has aliens that are…very alien. I haven't but I liked Perdido Street Station quite a bit, I'll have to pick it up, thanks!
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Feb 15, 2024 18:39
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fritz posted:How do you interpret the mirror test results? Inconsistent and inconclusive.
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Feb 15, 2024 18:41
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I would posit that the "line" is awareness of one's own mortality. Elephants and dolphins probably don't have that although I guess we don't know for sure.
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Feb 15, 2024 18:44
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Elephants at at minimum able to recognize that bones of dead elephants lacking flesh were once living elephants even years after passing.
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Feb 15, 2024 18:55
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fritz posted:How do you interpret the mirror test results? At best we're just defining all those things as being as being humanlike
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Feb 15, 2024 19:06
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Yngwie Mangosteen posted:I haven't but I liked Perdido Street Station quite a bit, I'll have to pick it up, thanks! Oh yeah definitely would recommend it in that case. It’s all about how humans communicate with this extremely alien species (they speak multiple words at once so the dominant means of communication is through genetically modified human twins). Thread hero Ursula LeGuin loved it! https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/08/embassytown-china-mieville-review
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Feb 15, 2024 19:14
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mystes posted:I mean how can we know whether that's really meaningful? We have no idea how to determine sentience, intelligence, etc. or how they would work outside of humans so we just make up random tests that humans pass and apply them to animals, and we can't ask them about it so we just kind of arbitrarily interpret the results Eh, it's a little more than that - the capacity the mirror test demonstrates is the capacity to have a mental representation of the entity watching. There's just no other way for an animal/human/whatever to see a mirror and react by investigating their own body unless A) they have some kind of mental representation that they exist as an entity in the world, B) that representation has a visual component or is otherwise able to map visual data onto the idea of the self. Those are non-trivial cognitive tasks. Whether they constitute sentience or not you can definitely debate, but for me personally "has an understanding that the being exists as an entity in the physical world" is not a bad starting point. Yes, it's true that humans pass that - but the argument behind it isn't arbitrary, it's that the mirror test requires specific mental capacities in order to "pass" it.
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Feb 15, 2024 19:17
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I'm a huge fan of Embassytown, really alien aliens rule
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Feb 15, 2024 19:31
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The difficulty I have with the idea that consciousness is an evolutionary dead end is that its been wildly successful on earth across a range of animals. I strongly suspect theoretical p-zombies would simply fail to survive due to lack of self-preservation instinct. Plenty of nonconscious things can display self-preservation. Bacteria can display self-preservation. But anyway I don't think Blindsight is really valuable because it tries to describe how the world works. It just sets up a great premise tha is true within the context of the book but which asks us to reflect on our own assumptions and conceits about the link between intelligence and consciousness in the real world. Even in this thread I see tons of people asking "but if they weren't conscious, how could they [X incredibly simple thing that even humans arguably don't need consciousness for?]" We are really really really culturally encouraged to think of consciousness and cognition as the same thing but they're not. Even the way we learn things from our culture is a process of rendering the conscious into the unconscious. Wherever you aim a laser, the laser sees light, so the laser says "light is required for anything to exist..."
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Feb 15, 2024 19:37
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I suspect that alien intellence would be much less incomprehensible than some of you all seem to believe. Covergant evolution is a thing. If you want a real life example then just look at octopuses, who evolved near-sapient level intelligence almost entirely independently of mammalian intelligence. Biological aliens wouldn't be particularly human, but they'd likely be recognizably animalistic. Non-organic aliens... yeah, fair, they're pretty unguessible.
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Feb 15, 2024 19:43
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General Battuta posted:. Oh sure. In the abstract that's entirely valid. In practice though the few pounds of wet meat between my ears keeps going "but wait" over such things, and the suspension of disbelief collapses. I have a similar difficulty reading alternative history. "But Napoleon *didnt* cross the channel! That's wrong!" I whine petulantly This is my failure as a reader of speculative fiction.
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Feb 15, 2024 19:45
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Haystack posted:I suspect that alien intellence would be much less incomprehensible than some of you all seem to believe. Covergant evolution is a thing. If you want a real life example then just look at octopuses, who evolved near-sapient level intelligence almost entirely independently of mammalian intelligence. Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development, of course. Hieronymous Alloy posted:Oh sure. In the abstract that's entirely valid. In practice though the few pounds of wet meat between my ears keeps going "but wait" over such things, and the suspension of disbelief collapses. I just don't think it's possible to imagine non-conscious cognition as a conscious cogitator.
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Feb 15, 2024 19:50
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General Battuta posted:Plenty of nonconscious things can display self-preservation. Bacteria can display self-preservation. Yeah, it's a really neat thought experiment and I think it's pretty plausible as those go. Evolutional fitness is a nonsense term if you remove it from a specific environment and basically all multi factor optimization algorithms have problems with local minima. AARD VARKMAN posted:I'm a huge fan of Embassytown, really alien aliens rule Same, double aliens are cool.
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Feb 15, 2024 20:02
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