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Notes -
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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