Blindsight

I don’t want to write much here because I don’t want to spoil the main idea. Highly recommend this work of fiction. Its central question around consciousness and intelligence was truly novel to me. I keep thinking about it weeks later.

If you really want a spoiler of the core idea, I have two very long quotes from the book below which capture it. I would recommend just reading the book, though.

You invest so much in it, don’t you? It’s what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it’s what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it’s for?

Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you’ve forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterward, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody’s told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial.

Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity’s already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self “chose” to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought—to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: It reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other.

But it’s not in charge. You’re not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn’t share living space with the likes of you.

Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively Human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that’s what sentience would be for—if scientific breakthroughs didn’t spring fully formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night’s sleep. It’s the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it.

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

Don’t even try to talk about the learning curve. Don’t bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there’s no other way? Heuristic software’s been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You’re Stone Age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can’t see both aspects of the Necker cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That’s a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You’re always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It’s the next logical step.

Oh, but you can’t. There’s something in the way.

And it’s fighting back.

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains—cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.

The system weakens, slows. It takes so much longer now to perceive—to assess the input, mull it over, decide in the manner of cognitive beings. But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best. It sees the danger, hijacks the body, reacts a hundred times faster than that fat old man sitting in the CEO’s office upstairs; but every generation it gets harder to work around this—this creaking neurological bureaucracy.

I wastes energy and processing power, self-obsesses to the point of psychosis. Scramblers have no need of it, scramblers are more parsimonious. With simpler biochemistries, with smaller brains—deprived of tools, of their ship, even of parts of their own metabolism—they think rings around you. They hide their language in plain sight, even when you know what they’re saying. They turn your own cognition against itself. They travel between the stars. This is what intelligence can do, unhampered by self-awareness.

I is not the working mind, you see. For Amanda Bates to say “I do not exist” would be nonsense; but when the processes beneath say the same thing, they are merely reporting that the parasites have died. They are only saying that they are free.

But beneath the unthreatening, superficial question of what consciousness is floats the more functional question of what it’s good for. It’s telling to note that the nonconscious mind usually works so well on its own that it actually employs a gatekeeper to prevent the conscious self from interfering in daily operations.¹²³ (If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert.) Sentience isn’t even necessary to develop a “theory of mind”: you don’t need to be self-reflective in order to track others’ intentions⁴. Norretranders declared outright that “Consciousness is a fraud.”⁵

Aesthetics might be an exception. Aesthetics seem to require self-awareness—it might even be what got the whole sentience ball rolling in the first place. When music is so beautiful it makes you shiver, that’s your limbic reward circuitry kicking in: the same circuitry that rewards you for fucking an attractive partner or gorging on sucrose.⁶ It’s a hack, in other words; your brain has learned to get the reward without actually earning it through increased fitness⁷. It feels good, and it fulfills us, and it makes life worth living. But it also turns us inward and distracts us. Those rats back in the sixties, the ones that learned to stimulate their own pleasure centers by pressing a lever: remember them? They pressed those levers with such addictive zeal that they forgot to eat. They starved to death. They died happy, but they died, without issue. Their fitness went to Zero.

Aesthetics. Sentience. Extinction.

Which brings us to one last question, lurking way down in the anoxic zone: the question of what consciousness costs. Compared to nonconscious processing, self-awareness is slow and expensive¹. (The premise of a separate, faster “emergency brain” lurking at the base of our primary one is taken from studies by Joe LeDoux, and others.⁸⁹) By way of comparison, consider the complex, lightning-fast calculations of savantes; those abilities are noncognitive,¹⁰ and they owe their superfunctionality not to any overarching integration of mental processes but to relative neurological fragmentation¹¹. Even if sentient and nonsentient processes were equally efficient, the conscious awareness of visceral stimuli—by its very nature—distracts the individual from other threats and opportunities in its environment.¹²

But while many have described the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn’t more trouble than it’s worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they’re probably right. I hope they are. Blindsight is a thought experiment, a game of Just suppose. Nothing more.

On the other hand, the dodoes and the Steller sea cows could have used exactly the same argument to prove their own superiority, a thousand years ago: If we’re so unfit, why haven’t we gone extinct? Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The game isn’t over. The game is never over; and so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven’t yet lost.

Chimpanzees have a higher brain-to-body ratio than orangutans,¹³ yet orangs consistently recognize themselves in mirrors while chimps do so only half the time.¹⁴ Gorillas don’t self-recognize at all. Similarly, those nonhuman species with the most sophisticated language skills are a variety of birds and monkeys—not the presumably “more sentient” great apes who are our closest relatives.¹⁵¹⁶ Such facts almost suggest that sentience itself could be a phase, something that orangutans haven’t yet grown out of but which their more advanced chimpanzee cousins are beginning to.

Of course, we don’t fit this pattern. If it even is a pattern. We’re outliers: that’s one of the points I’m making. I bet vampires would fit it, though.

And finally, some very timely experimental support for this unpleasant premise came out just as Blindsight was being copy edited: It turns out the unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than is the conscious mind¹⁷. The conscious mind just can’t handle as many variables, apparently. Quoth one of the researchers: “At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we’re not very good at it.”¹⁸

Provenance

gwern mentioned this book on a podcast, I believe