Comments on: Blindsight

By: Hank Roberts

Hank Roberts — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 06:34:29 +0000

Thank you. I’m blessed by a membership private library (Mechanics’, in San Francisco) and found the book there as soon as it was available, so I am delighted to find the discussion. Those who haven’t read it yet — buy, borrow, beg your library, get the book. Read it first. come back and talk.

By: Blindsight and Hard SF « Torque Control

Blindsight and Hard SF « Torque Control — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 19:13:08 +0000

[...] So for a nontrivial chunk of the past 48 hours, I have been trying to write something coherent about Peter Watts’ latest novel, Blindsight. It’s a very good book, and there’s an interesting discussion of its central thesis here — though if you want to pick up a copy it’d probably be best to act sooner rather than later, since Blindsight’s publication seems to be attended by the sort of fiasco that afflicted the first edition of The Separation. Writing about it is proving difficult, though, and that’s partly because it’s hard to summarise (as a review inevitably must) without compromising the intelligence and rigour of Watts’ story, and partly because one of the things I want to talk about, at least in passing, is what it means to say the book is “hard sf” — which it clearly is — and why the hardness of the sf is part of the reason the book succeeds. And I can’t quite find a way to say it. [...]

By: Lanny Quarles

Lanny Quarles — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 10:06:10 +0000

also, the “aesthetic sense” is also used evidenced in behaviors say like the bower bird’s nest building..

can aesthetics be reduced to an economy or semiotics of specialized fitness indicators. I think in a certain sense it can.

look at the strange attractor. now i suppose this is poor scholarship,
but why inherently does something like the sonnet form survive. or why
can’t say blogging be considered as an extended form of the novel
in the sense of an extended “inaesthetic” instance of the chronotope.

You writing here and me reading it and commenting seems just about as interesting as half the work in characterization you might find in many boilerplate novels out there. Film Verite’ might be one model or association
etc.. The line between life and art are permanently fuzzed and in a really negative sense you can see this prominently in the case of Politics..

Foucault’s use of Genealogy versus History points to social subjectivity
which is just a euphemism for “fiction” or “reduction” or Framing..

All reality, or least the expression of it, is some case of framing.
Zizek approaches this pretty well..

Anyway I’m glad your blog is here and I’ve been reading you for several years now, and am always happy to do so.

I sure wish you could help me get another professor’s paper.
He wrote a book on kaironomia, and he has a paper on slime molds
and the grotesque. Its a paper on the biological grotesque which is something I’m really interested in, but he won’t give me the time of day.

You may not either, but I really want to have a look at that paper of his,
so I’ll risk it. The guy’s name is Eric Charles White.

Just trying to find somebody who knows the guy and could hook me
up with that paper!

By: Lanny Quarles

Lanny Quarles — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 08:45:55 +0000

One thing that occurs to me in reading this, and I really enjoyed the post
a lot, is that one can follow a paradigm I’ve been exploring in my own art
that the ‘reductio’ depending on context ie within the pluroma of undecidabiliy of the organon can recieve and produce just as many hermeneutical openings as something designed to be multi-leveled.

IE the lack of an aesthetic sense IS in essence a form of aesthetic.

so if we look at say our own appreciation and incorporation of ‘natural forms’ into our ‘aestethic’ (oops, but hmm i like it) ‘aesthetic’ you can
see that there are blind morphologies and indeed social morphologies
whose contours we are not able to acheive by conscious design.

Look at the ants. The economy and purity of that social system is wired in.
We marvel at its complexity at its functionality etc. yet because of our
set of cathexes we obviously would reject such a thing.. perhaps ths is a bad example. I guess what I’m getting at is the actuality of non-conscious
aesthetics.

You can no more argue the pure utilitarianess of brachiopodes than you can say that the reformation was actually the product of the little ice age
that affected so much of history in one way or another.

Or look at Mount Toba’s relationship to our modern racial debate.
What racial diversity did we loose 70k yrs ago that migh have shaken up the mix later.

You go into this pretty well in your discussion of natural selection
and randomness etc..

I’m not expressing this well.

I’m not a deist, or anything like that, but when things like the statement

Deus absconditus, sub contrario

seems to point to a grounding of consciousness in the field.. sort of like sheldrakes morphological fields etc..

all of us are contingent on the field
but is field a null?

I certainly don’t know, but in certain circumstances it certainly
doesnt seem like it.

Reality seems productive of infinitely unique events.
I don’t want to say IS productived of infinitely unique events
because essentialism is generally wrong in practice..

anyhoo. shit if i know, but WOW! what a kickass blog-post Steve!
Totally excellent writing which got my damn neurons chattering
pretty good. Otherwise I’d still be sitting there contemplating making
another pot of coffee or how bad my hand is hurting..

thx again. way cool post.

By: Steven Shaviro

Steven Shaviro — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:37:12 +0000

Thanks, Jason. This has now been corrected.

By: Jason M. Robertson

Jason M. Robertson — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:25:00 +0000

Just an FYI, your first link to your Rifters blogging points to an unrelated post. I assume it was meant to post to the Starfish-related entry I found via search.

By: Ktismatics

Ktismatics — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 13:27:16 +0000

Steven Pinker notes that human beings are only “so-so scientists” by nature: Our brains were adapted for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not… we are apt to want our version of the truth, rather than the truth itself, to prevail.

Certainly scientific knowledge has enabled our species to dominate the planet. But “good” science is also true, and scientific progress often forces scientists to abandon intuitive, popular, and authoritative explanations of the world that also happen to be wrong. It’s possible, of course, to reduce every human intent and action to evolutionary terms: the individual who comes up with a new and better bit of science achieves admiration, status, desirable sexual partners, fit offspring, perpetuation of the genes. Still, it helps if the new bit of science really is good. Maybe “goodness” in all its classic forms — truth, beauty, justice — is a kind of aesthetic epiphenomenal overlay on our adaptive apparati.

By: Mr. Waggish

Mr. Waggish — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 04:13:35 +0000

I’m not sure I follow. If consciousness is not purely epiphenomenal (zombie-popularizer David Chalmers is epiphenomenal), I don’t quite see how it can be carved off from the rest of the mind to be an aesthetic center. And it doesn’t mesh with Gould’s statements about evolutionary “exaptations” (I think that’s the word), because a non-epiphenomenal consciousness would have to play some adaptive or non-adaptive role. It may have been a byproduct of an adaptation so good that it stuck around, but the mere fact that consciousness (= aesthetics) is considered maladaptive makes it non-disinterested. And at least by Chalmers, these aliens are not true zombies, but simply non-conscious entities.

Wittgenstein would say that aesthetic behavior and speech acts are separated from the interiority of aesthetic experience, and I think this is more correct.

The epiphenomenal/non-epiphenomenal contradiction also popped up in a story in the lastest “Year’s Best SF” which I can’t remember the name of, but the author switches his position midway through the story. I guess he does so because writing fiction about the difference between conscious and unconscious beings is rather boring, if not impossible, when consciousness is taken to be purely epiphenomenal.