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So, what are you reading?
Still on The Question of Palestine. Said's writing is great as usual, and it is making me want to reread Orientalism. He kinda omitted that the displacement of 1948 was in the context of war, but perhaps he was assuming common knowledge. Interesting facts abound, but the core of the book is the system of thought he's applying, and it remains unclear how useful it is.
Otherwise picking up Al-Ghazali's The Book of Contemplation, book 39 of his Revival of the Religious Sciences series.
Last week I said I was about halfway through Blindsight and didn't really understand the hype, and several people chimed in to second that motion. But about the two-thirds mark, something unexpected happened: it became... good? I'd like to talk about why but don't want to spoiler-tag the entire rest of the comment, so if you have any interest in reading this book, don't read the rest of the comment.
SPOILERS BELOW
The revelation that the aliens can appear invisible to a single individual by synchronising their movements with the individual's saccades, but this tactic doesn't work with groups of people (because their saccades aren't synchronised with each other) was surprising and ingenious. I understand the novel is controversial for its later revelation that, while the aliens are highly technologically advanced, they are not "conscious" as we would understand it, and more than one character goes out of his way to point out how vestigial consciousness is from an evolutionary standpoint, given that humans can perform all manner of highly complex tasks while unconscious (e.g. there have been reports of sleepwalkers getting into their cars and driving without incident). Even the writer who wrote the introduction describes it as an excellent book whose core thesis she vociferously disagrees with.
I'm not entirely sure if Watts's contention is that consciousness is vestigial, an unnecessary evolutionary offshoot the human species would be best served by ridding ourselves of. To be a bit more charitable, the novel could be read as an attempt to demonstrate the concept that consciousness is not a prerequisite for advanced intelligence. I must admit I've never really struggled to decouple the one from the other, but a lot of people seem to find this idea absurd on its face: it's remarkable how many anti-AI arguments boil down to "people say that artificial intelligence is possible, but computers can't be conscious, QED AI is impossible". Blindsight provides us with a vivid example of what a hypothetical non-conscious, non-sapient and yet clearly intelligent species might look like. I wonder if Nick Bostrom was inspired by Blindsight when describing his "Disneyland with no children":
A thought-provoking novel, even if it takes a long time to get there. I'm not going to donate it to the charity shop just yet.
SPOILERS OVER
I'm about 40 pages into Eric Hoffer's The True Believer. Three years ago I earned an AAQC by arguing that the only people demanding radical ground-up changes to the society in which they live are people who are one or more of poor, unattractive, widely disliked and uncharismatic. How disheartening to learn that Hoffer had scooped me seventy years prior.
I agree that Blindsight was thought-provoking; I just wish its ideas held up to scrutiny.
Spoilers for Blindsight below
According to the conceit of the book, you don't need consciousness to achieve great things and humans aren't special. So, what happens when one (1) human decides "Hey, there's some scary shit out there, let me launch a Von Neumann self-replicating droneswarm that stays synched and fueled with quantum-linked antimatter and blows the shit out of anything it detects fucking with it."?
I feel like the book throws in a lot of completely random setting-building stuff that is just there for vague thematic relevence, and not because it builds a coherent world that explores the ideas therein. In the world of Blindsight, what should happen when humans try to exterminate an ant colony? One is pure, unconstrained instinct, sharpened and honed by millions of years of evolution, with a million eyes and a distributed processing network, with built-in subroutines to handle nearly any kind of obstacle it encounters in its native environment. On the other hand, we have hairless apes...who, because are conscious, can do things like build the civilizational and industrial infrastructure to make and distribute ant poison.
Ah, but what if Satan-Cthulhu was secretly feeding the ants the kind of information that we clearly see needs a conscious mind to extract from the universe, and also the ants could do some weird-ass quantum shit with radiation? Well, for one, the ants would be a really poor thought experiment vector, as I feel the Scramblers are; we have no context for how they think, much less that they do. If the Scramblers are not conscious, why do they respond to torture at all? The story wants me to believe that there is some kind of cosmic Chinese Room of responses that can perfectly pattern-match and encompass the weird-ass protagonists and their dysfunction, such that the Scramblers can somehow arrive at the correct solution to get some random stuff to happen. To me, it just reads like the Scramblers are being fed the author's notes; they don't feel like inhuman superintelligences, they feel like plot devices.
But the thing that did make me realize that the ideas of the book were fundamentally hollow was, ironically, the creepy cool saccade trick. Because, even if we assume that these are actual-Lovecraftian space monsters and literal reality-bending Nyarlathotep is whispering in their space-ears to explain exactly what neurons firing in the squishy human brain-meats that are doing the optical processing...if you have no conception of yourself, and you look at the feed of a creature looking at a room with you in it, how do you know what data has you in it and what doesn't? How do you know how to move to hide yourself if you don't know who or what you are?
I feel like it is kind of the point of the book that the human characters are pretty much weak, helpless, and make consistently bad decisions (when they make decisions at all), but telling a story that cracks apart when one single, solitary character uses judgement and foresight and explores the elements of the setting as they are presented because they have an agenda of Not Dying and take reasonable actions thereof is, to me, not an engaging story.
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Doesn't the opposite also exist? There are plenty of people out there arguing, "LLMs are instrumentally intelligent, therefore they are conscious", despite that being the same error. 'Intelligence' in the sense of the capacity to perform complex tasks is a different thing to consciousness.
Unfortunately the word 'intelligence' in natural language tends to bundle a number of concepts. When I say 'intelligent' in a casual context I usually mean some nexus of "has internal conscious experience", "has real thoughts", "is able to solve complex problems", "can engage with abstract concepts", "is possessed of a rational soul", and so on. When faced with a machine that's capable of solving complex problems but none of the other things, it's understandable that a lot of people's reactions are pretty wonky.
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