Dear Peter Watts
Oct. 11th, 2007 06:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
che_gilson"Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts." -James Nicol
Well I finished Blindsight and like all his books it was amazing, challenging, thought provoking, depressing, eye-opening, brilliant and apocalyptic. I'm not sure he could write something happy if he tried. It makes me wonder how he can go on living knowing what he knows about humanity and the nature of conciousness. I'm amazed he hasn't hung himself in the shower by now. I couldn't even bigin to give a synopsis of the book. I need to read it again but I'm not sure I can face it again. But I know I missed a lot of the ideas the first time around, and what big ideas they are. Nearly beyond the comprehesion of mear meat as trhey would say in the book.
A lot of it revolves around the idea of intelligence without conciousness. That the 'we' that we think we are isn't really neccessary at all. That conciousness serves no real purpose an is an evolutionary quirk that we ended up with. Late in the book the idea is presented that maybe we could grow out of it. That if we could go farther without it. Conciousness-self awareness isn't neccessary and intelligence is not a sign of success as a species. We just think we're more successful because we CAN think about it, while everything else out there is busy surviving.
Peter Watts writes the best aliens ever-PERIOD. Both terrestrial and extra terrestrial. There was a small bit in Starfish were he wrote from the perspective of a brain that was grown basically for software functions and it is the single greatest peice of writing from an alien perspective that I have ever read. The aliens in Blindsight have immense intelligence and no conciousness, and no genes. Which makes them the greatest aliens ever concieved of.
The vampire- I still can't quit wrap my head around the vampires in Blindsight. Not the hows and whys and what they are, that's easy- I mean how they see the world. I wish he'd spent more time on Jukka Serasti. He gave them a great sense of being predators and they are easily the best vampires to grace literature since... well ever. I'm not sure how I can describe them, they are smarter than humans, by far, they have no concept of past tense, and they can hold multiple world views without conflict. But this is just right from the book, it doesn't mean I understand them any better. I wanted to know HOW they thought, about things. The vampire was always ahead, by far, of the humans, but was also part of the ship's AI, so at the end it was hard to tell if it was really Jukka or the AI or a combined conciousness of both of them. The ship's AI was barely mentioned and non-interasctive with the human characters until the very end. I'm still not sure why the main character Siri Keeton was so important at the end considering it was going to take years to get back to earth and even then from the reports he got at the end, it sounded like maybe the vampires had taken over or something so there wasn't much point in going back. Not that it mattered, he had nothing to do but go back anyway. For more info on the vampire in Blindsight go here http://www.rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm
Blindsight and it's big ideas has kept me up at night, literally, just thinking and thinking about them. And I can't stop thinking! Actually I'm trying too. Maybe I can stripm away a little of my own conciosness and just funtion intead of think.
I think I'll do fan art of some of the characters from Blindsight. He has pictures of the cast of the book on his site but you can tell they are just friends of his... Of course they all look like anime. Sometimes I'm very frustrated with my anime style, I wish I'd cultivated a little more realism over the years.
Well I finished Blindsight and like all his books it was amazing, challenging, thought provoking, depressing, eye-opening, brilliant and apocalyptic. I'm not sure he could write something happy if he tried. It makes me wonder how he can go on living knowing what he knows about humanity and the nature of conciousness. I'm amazed he hasn't hung himself in the shower by now. I couldn't even bigin to give a synopsis of the book. I need to read it again but I'm not sure I can face it again. But I know I missed a lot of the ideas the first time around, and what big ideas they are. Nearly beyond the comprehesion of mear meat as trhey would say in the book.
A lot of it revolves around the idea of intelligence without conciousness. That the 'we' that we think we are isn't really neccessary at all. That conciousness serves no real purpose an is an evolutionary quirk that we ended up with. Late in the book the idea is presented that maybe we could grow out of it. That if we could go farther without it. Conciousness-self awareness isn't neccessary and intelligence is not a sign of success as a species. We just think we're more successful because we CAN think about it, while everything else out there is busy surviving.
Peter Watts writes the best aliens ever-PERIOD. Both terrestrial and extra terrestrial. There was a small bit in Starfish were he wrote from the perspective of a brain that was grown basically for software functions and it is the single greatest peice of writing from an alien perspective that I have ever read. The aliens in Blindsight have immense intelligence and no conciousness, and no genes. Which makes them the greatest aliens ever concieved of.
The vampire- I still can't quit wrap my head around the vampires in Blindsight. Not the hows and whys and what they are, that's easy- I mean how they see the world. I wish he'd spent more time on Jukka Serasti. He gave them a great sense of being predators and they are easily the best vampires to grace literature since... well ever. I'm not sure how I can describe them, they are smarter than humans, by far, they have no concept of past tense, and they can hold multiple world views without conflict. But this is just right from the book, it doesn't mean I understand them any better. I wanted to know HOW they thought, about things. The vampire was always ahead, by far, of the humans, but was also part of the ship's AI, so at the end it was hard to tell if it was really Jukka or the AI or a combined conciousness of both of them. The ship's AI was barely mentioned and non-interasctive with the human characters until the very end. I'm still not sure why the main character Siri Keeton was so important at the end considering it was going to take years to get back to earth and even then from the reports he got at the end, it sounded like maybe the vampires had taken over or something so there wasn't much point in going back. Not that it mattered, he had nothing to do but go back anyway. For more info on the vampire in Blindsight go here http://www.rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm
Blindsight and it's big ideas has kept me up at night, literally, just thinking and thinking about them. And I can't stop thinking! Actually I'm trying too. Maybe I can stripm away a little of my own conciosness and just funtion intead of think.
I think I'll do fan art of some of the characters from Blindsight. He has pictures of the cast of the book on his site but you can tell they are just friends of his... Of course they all look like anime. Sometimes I'm very frustrated with my anime style, I wish I'd cultivated a little more realism over the years.
