We are all fake
Apr. 6th, 2009 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellestraI just finished Peter Watts' Blindsight. It’s a very good (and really short – in a time when 1000 pages is not unusual) novel. There are aliens and vampires and a lot of science. The novel was nominated for Hugo and is available online.
It’s hard to write aliens nowadays. When they understandable they invoke the rubber foreheads jokes. When they’re not it’s hard to make them seem real and not just gimmick. The same goes for the near singularity that has been done that it’s hard to say anything new. I must say I’m impressed with the concepts in this novel. I loved the space travel, the post-human society but most of all I loved the biology.
I was fascinated by the mechanism of space travel used by the Theseus – clever use of teleportation. I was even more impressed by aliens. You get why no understanding is possible but you still don’t get them. They are both extremely intelligent and really stupid. And in the end it makes sense. And made me wonder if it really isn’t a better way.
In SF (the hard, really trying to extrapolate future trends), as in everything I suppose, there are trends, fads. Right now everyone touches the Singularity problem. After all space travels is slow and expensive, aliens don’t respond and why go anywhere if you can just become God-like being now. Of course there are many takes. Some are against - Ken MacLeod often writes human cultures that fight against and don’t even acknowledge sentience of those raptured. Others point out the pointlessness of keeping our bodies with their limited abilities and faulty equipment. Our bodies and minds have evolved for dealing with the life on savanna. How long will they be enough for the future? We get many versions of society on different steps to Singularity in which one either becomes useless or goes into never ending Red Queen race with the machine enhancements. Till we become machines. But what if we can’t? If our own architecture is just an illusion created by our hardware – the one that machine version cannot replicate? We dream about transferring our consciousness to machines so that it can go on using their ability of exponential growth. But what if that’s the one part of us that cannot be translated? What if they can get everything else – resolve problems, create and grow – but never get self-aware?
I knew most of the syndromes described in Blindshight – not being able to perceive left side of anything and everything was always my favourite. I also knew about the perception problems. The world we see is an illusion. The virtual reality projected by our mind. We only see a small part of the world around us clearly – the rest is smeared. Mind makes up a wrap around clear, moving illusion by extrapolating from unmoving pictures taken by retina. Retinal receptors, just like smell receptors, start to ignore steady signal – if your eyes didn’t make those small, involuntary movements you’d stop seeing unmoving objects. What pisses me off most is how slow the picture processing is. If you get auditory signal – reaction is almost immediate. Visual signal – you can perceive the delay. Try it – see how long it takes you to move since you notice green light. You’re slow.
I also knew about the fact that the signal for the movement is sent before we make conscious decision to move. Thinking about moving and doing it are in opposite sequence then you thought. So maybe self is also an illusion created by the mind. One has to ask then why? And is it really necessary?
I also love the idea of vampires – including the biochemistry. And the explanation of their extinction is beautiful – the bottleneck effect and Euclidean geometry. How fake our illusions of reality are shows most when somebody with different perception comes – they can see the pixels.
And as an biologist and general science nerd I love the Notes and References part. I have a weakness for such things - Dune, Prince of Nothing, WoT. But it's even better when it's real (well except the vampire part, right?).
It’s hard to write aliens nowadays. When they understandable they invoke the rubber foreheads jokes. When they’re not it’s hard to make them seem real and not just gimmick. The same goes for the near singularity that has been done that it’s hard to say anything new. I must say I’m impressed with the concepts in this novel. I loved the space travel, the post-human society but most of all I loved the biology.
I was fascinated by the mechanism of space travel used by the Theseus – clever use of teleportation. I was even more impressed by aliens. You get why no understanding is possible but you still don’t get them. They are both extremely intelligent and really stupid. And in the end it makes sense. And made me wonder if it really isn’t a better way.
In SF (the hard, really trying to extrapolate future trends), as in everything I suppose, there are trends, fads. Right now everyone touches the Singularity problem. After all space travels is slow and expensive, aliens don’t respond and why go anywhere if you can just become God-like being now. Of course there are many takes. Some are against - Ken MacLeod often writes human cultures that fight against and don’t even acknowledge sentience of those raptured. Others point out the pointlessness of keeping our bodies with their limited abilities and faulty equipment. Our bodies and minds have evolved for dealing with the life on savanna. How long will they be enough for the future? We get many versions of society on different steps to Singularity in which one either becomes useless or goes into never ending Red Queen race with the machine enhancements. Till we become machines. But what if we can’t? If our own architecture is just an illusion created by our hardware – the one that machine version cannot replicate? We dream about transferring our consciousness to machines so that it can go on using their ability of exponential growth. But what if that’s the one part of us that cannot be translated? What if they can get everything else – resolve problems, create and grow – but never get self-aware?
I knew most of the syndromes described in Blindshight – not being able to perceive left side of anything and everything was always my favourite. I also knew about the perception problems. The world we see is an illusion. The virtual reality projected by our mind. We only see a small part of the world around us clearly – the rest is smeared. Mind makes up a wrap around clear, moving illusion by extrapolating from unmoving pictures taken by retina. Retinal receptors, just like smell receptors, start to ignore steady signal – if your eyes didn’t make those small, involuntary movements you’d stop seeing unmoving objects. What pisses me off most is how slow the picture processing is. If you get auditory signal – reaction is almost immediate. Visual signal – you can perceive the delay. Try it – see how long it takes you to move since you notice green light. You’re slow.
I also knew about the fact that the signal for the movement is sent before we make conscious decision to move. Thinking about moving and doing it are in opposite sequence then you thought. So maybe self is also an illusion created by the mind. One has to ask then why? And is it really necessary?
I also love the idea of vampires – including the biochemistry. And the explanation of their extinction is beautiful – the bottleneck effect and Euclidean geometry. How fake our illusions of reality are shows most when somebody with different perception comes – they can see the pixels.
And as an biologist and general science nerd I love the Notes and References part. I have a weakness for such things - Dune, Prince of Nothing, WoT. But it's even better when it's real (well except the vampire part, right?).
