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blindsight is great, freeze frame revolution is great everything else kind of sucks the man himself is a gigantic sourpuss grump and pretty annoying distortion park posted:one thing I was expecting Blindsight to go into, but it didn't much as far as I remember, was some sort of speculation about how the phenomenon of consciousness arises. on what basis do they decide that the aliens aren't conscious? why are their bags atoms and electrical fields not conscious but ours are? i take the point that consciousness might not be an advantage but why is it a disadvantage, perhaps it's a passive by product of ... something I think they realize it after they realize rorschach is doing chatgpt to them and then again after they recognize that its crawlers cannot communicate either. Frankly though I don't think it's that well established in the text, you kind of have to already know the point Watts wants to make about consciousness and chinese rooms e: looked it up and I'm partly right, Sarasti figures it out using vampire brain logic based on how rorshach/the crawlers respond to communication and the mental model they don't have, and forces Siri to recognize it right before everything goes to poo poo Pentecoastal Elites fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Apr 18, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 22:42
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distortion park posted:this is kind of weird because it's inferring something about the crawlers based on their lack of certain behaviours - what if they just don't behave however Sarasti thinks they should? they're weird aliens after all there's no reason their behaviour should be particularly understandable to even vampires. that's what I thought too, but I think the idea Watts wants to get across is that consciousness is wasteful and unnecessary, and the reason rorschach is hostile towards humanity is that without a model of consciousness it interprets human communication as a virus/attack, and that human consciousness in general is a rare maladaptive fluke and if we ever want to survive or be competitive on a galactic scale we should engineer ourselves out of consciousness. the crawlers aren't, and rorscach isn't either, but it's infinitely more complex and intelligent anyway but I agree it's not that well-established in the actual text
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Apr 19, 2023 16:43
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zoux posted:I don't think he's making an argument other than "consciousness is not necessarily the endpoint of intelligence", I certainly don't think he's advocating that we remove our own consciousness if we want to survive. The removal of that consciousness would be no different than the entire human race going extinct, humanoid automatons with no sense of self wouldn't be "humanity". In almost every scifi work involving intelligent aliens, they have consciousness, but what Blindsight presupposes is, what if they didn't. I'm speaking in terms of the universe presented in the book. I don't think Watts wants or is advocating for that at all, or even arguing towards it really, that's just a conceit of the story. Maybe to some degree it might be what he sort of believes could be true based on the notes and references? As far as engineering consciousness away I think Bates makes that suggestion near the end of the book (and also agrees that it'd be tantamount to death)
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Apr 19, 2023 17:06
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the reason rorschach went to defcon one* is that it interpreted human communication as an explicit viral attack precisely because consciousness was a completely alien concept to it and it gets its confirmation when a space ship floats out to broadcast viral signals directly at it. but it's hard to say that it really did go defcon one because it could have vaporized thesus with one of its ramscoop drones as soon as they got to big ben. I think this is sort of answered in Echopraxia with rorscach infesting the icarus beam to create portia, so it might have been intentionally not destroying thesus until it could get that set up. maybe it calculated that doing that was more valuable or worth the risk of the rorscach artifact itself being destroyed. it doesn't have a consciousness to protect, so the instant the portia scheme became more valuable, or even potentially more valuable, to it it'd have no problem letting itself get blown upGABA ghoul posted:IIRC the book somewhat conflates ego and consciousness. The scramblers have no ego, but they are still biological creatures driven by needs and desires and they put their intelligence to the task of satisfying these just like us. There is no reason to assume that they wouldn't satisfy their need to avoid death by artificially extending their life. Or decide that the optimal way to satisfy other needs is to put themselves into a skinner box like 'Heaven'. I don't think it does. The book even kind of talks indirectly at the scamblers/rorscach's needs and desires: fitness, kin selection, etc. They're just very alien to us principally because they lack consciousness. Obviously they have no desire to avoid death (scrambler "data dumping"), and rorscach as a whole may not have any real desire to, either. There's also no real reason to think that either rorscach or the scamblers themselves, specifically, are products of evolution. The scramblers are regarded as waldoes by the thesus's crew and that might be mostly true in the sense that they might have been engineered by rorscach or something back from wherever they came from. They grow in stacks, they're distributed computational nodes, and they come precharged with ATP (but can't regenerate it) points to like single-use disposable remote work modules. Entertainment, small talk, stuff like that is all a post-language process for our consciousnesses to assure themselves that we're safe with this or that person or group of people. If there's no other type of alien designing rorscachs and it's just scramblers all the way down, why would they need anything like that? Small talk would be an example of the inefficiencies of consciousness -- you don't need to spend the calories convincing yourself or someone else that you're safe and socially acceptable, scramblers would know on a more fundamental, direct level. Bees exhibit complex group behavior but don't have a need for small talk or entertainment, hyper-advanced distributed-computing bees might not either.
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Apr 21, 2023 17:31
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distortion park posted:I think to make that claim you have to have a very broad concept of language (which I agree with but idk if it's popular). Lot's of animals engage it what appears to be small talk like activities - monkeys, dolphins, many birds (and I think just the appearance is sufficient in this case). Would you also attribute some degree of consciousness to all of them?. You might draw a line somewhere but at the very least I don't see how a hard cutoff can be supported. monkeys, dolphins, and many birds are all social vertebrates, though! I think the scramblers are much more analogous to bees or ants, or really, neurons or organelles of rorschach. personally I am of the opinion that anything with a model of the universe that contains itself has some degree of consciousness. eg. fruit flies probably have some degree of consciousness. maybe weird stuff like the stock market also has some sort of (extremely alien) consciousness. I think ~in real life~ something like rorscach or the scrambles couldn't help but be conscious, it's a byproduct of a computational substrate that contains a recursive world-model. It might be slow and calorie-expensive, but it's as naturally occurring a phenomena as friction or electrical resistivity. Once you contain a model of your world that contains you in it that contains a model of your world that contains you... buddy, you're sunk! You have to carry the same homunculus as the rest of us. I think Watts acknowledges this when the scrambler in captivity doesn't immediately recognize itself in the question James asks it (what's in this room, or something like that?), but I don't think you could get as something as smart and flexible as the scrambler without also getting consciousness
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Apr 21, 2023 18:04
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