Blindsight novel spoiler thread

I don't think it was communicating with anything. We were broadcasting to whomever would listen and Rorschach was moving through space listening for prey. My metaphor for this was a shark- Rorschach and its ilk just coast through space until someone's dumb enough to say "Hey, we're intelligent and have resources!", at which point Rorschach flies over and kills them. It will react the same way to anything trying to communicate- the ability to communicate is threatening to Rorschach.

Similarly, as we've demonstrated with Voyager and similar probes, we'll gab away with anyone who's willing to listen. We have no sense of how dangerous space is.

Hrm. I don't think Rorschach was necessarily looking for prey. That form of resource gathering is fairly inefficient; if it's just raw resources you want there's plenty out there in uninhabited systems.

I think I'm confusing Rorschasch with the Burns-Caulfield comet, which (IIRC) is the original destination for Theseus.

I don't agree that Rorschach is out in space patrolling for sentient species with resources. There's no way for it to know what we have, and from what we saw of it. anything we can do in terms of resource processing is either going to be useless to it or way outclassed by their own processes. The only reason it ever interacted with Earth was our pointless EM transmissions which it took as an assault. If we kept control of our EM emissions or only broadcasted useful information, then Roschach would have just ignored humans unless it randomly stumbled directly into our solar system while collecting resources.

What would constitute useful information that is non-threatening?

Indeed it doesn't make sense for Rorschach to invade Earth, of all places, in order to acquire what measly resources are there. No, what aliens are always after is our sexy human orifices, for gross egg incubation and/or entertaining probing action. It is known, we are part of their reproductive cycle.

Information on what resources or environmental threats/dangers our solar system contains, warnings of movements of larger predatory space-faring species, requests to trade information or resources. Maybe other, I don't know. However, the vast majority of human EM communication is bs like radio shows, tv shows, or that stupid image we send out into space to show what we are all about. To a non-sentient hyperintelligent species, 99.99% of all human EM transmissions is nonsensical and a complete waste of cognitive resources.

I think you're measuring according to a sentient hyperintelligent species' priorities. To me it seems like anything unknown or difficult to understand (which should be our transmissions regardless, as demonstrated by the Chinese room understanding that Rorschach exhibits of language) would trip threat level past a certain point. The thing about the "wasted" communications is that they put us over the top, not their content per se; what's remarkable about that in the context of military/strategic hindsight in the book is how "reckless" we'd been with things that weren't strictly necessary. IIRC, YMMV.

A bit of column A, a bit of column B. It's the content that drives the sheer amount of transmission, alluded to in Siri's final bits about how much quieter Sol's radio space is getting. All the previous sentient-chatter being pared down to just ship telemetry and whatnot. Content+amount made Rorschach have to devote enormous resources to trying to figure out what was going on; and I think it's a valid interpretation that what really pushed it into hostility was Theseus itself suddenly being right in its face--an outcome that was largely hidden given the structure of the transmissions it was growing brains enough to sift through. Loud complexity that apparently masked a surprisingly sudden lunging approach isn't something an organism needs a huge pile of brains to see and react to as a threat display.

Yeah I could be wrong, I read the book at the beginning of last summer and I'm just going on memory.

From what I recall, Rorschach wasn't even really hostile until the crew started exploring it. Communication with it resulted in it telling them that the surface was dangerous and they should leave. An argument could be made for two cases: either Rorschach was still in an infant stage and wanted Theseus to go away because it was vulnerable, and after the gestation period it would come and destroy Earth, or maybe Rorschach just wanted to be left alone, and after identifying that all EM transmission from Sol was useless they'd simply block it out and keep minding their own business.

I did like that the book really didn't give any clear answers about the alien's motivations or intentions. They crew come up with their own theories, and eventually all accept one explanation, but there's never any definitive evidence given for it.

Given Rorschach's capabilities, on the off chance another one shows up in the Sol system (and the odds of that seem low, given the model that Watts is using for such things...) you just need to hit it with an AM bomb immediately. Like I said, if the galaxy is as hostile as Blindsight implies, the only rational response is aggressive xenocide!

What I meant by my statement was that any successful space transmission implies the resources necessary to create it, which means the civilization has something worth taking. It's the transmission that's the trigger, not the content. We could have been pitching cold fusion kits or Snuggies...Rorschach would have come regardless. Space is a big place, and a civilization dumb enough to broadcast without erecting defenses deserves to be eaten.

I got that, and my response was that while it makes sense to us to say "space is dangerous and if you make your presence known you'll get eaten", that's not a good enough rationale for a species as advanced as Rorschach to come and eat us. There needs to be something to be gained from us, which in my opinion is unlikely given the singleminded nature of a hyperintelligent non-sentient species, and how far advanced ahead of us they are. Any conquest of the Sol system would just be a coincidence, not based on them hearing the emissions of sentience and automatically going there to destroy them. Why seek out the 0.000001%*** of space with life when the same natural resources are available everywhere, with less danger? Remember that just because Rorschach is more advanced than us does not by definition make it the most advanced thing in the universe, and I think that a non-sentient life force whose primary goal is survival and procreation would opt to try and hide from potential threats rather than roam the galaxy picking unnecessary fights.

***number made up and not based on research of potential celestial biodensity

Good point. Maybe Rorschach wants to shut us up specifically because our broadcasts will attract those bigger, meaner things which would devour it simply because it happened to be hanging around Earth. It's just trying to survive rather than conquer.

Sane thing to do is just go elsewhere. Space is almost certainly mostly empty; there's plenty of safe places to quietly gather resources. Coming at another species - however silly and far down the totem pole they may seem - is potentially suicidal; because antimatter!

Maybe the argument is, They seem less advanced than us, we should take them out before the situation changes. It's like playing Civilization and having your Rifleman bump up against a border guarded by an Archer. Goodbye, Archer and his entire rich culture.

That's certainly a possibility, but as jeffd points out, the existence of antimatter bombs (I'm a little iffy on the science behind creating masses of antimatter large enough to annihilate entire Jupiter sized objects), means that if you meet a race capable of interstellar travel, your best bet is almost certainly to just stay the fuck away from them, especially if your race takes the form of gigantic isolated single organisms sent out into space randomly and without communication to their origin.

Hmm, to my understanding Rorschach, being not sentient, is really not planning anything. It has no thoughts or agency, it simply reacts like an animal would.

So it didn't arrive to earth because of a specific reasoning, but simply because it got annoyed by the "noise". It's like a dog snapping at an irritating fly. The difference being that due to its vast processing power, it can quickly analyze and respond in a way that appears sentient to us.

Keep in mind the Dandelion analogy. If we assume that it replicates itself on a somewhat large scale, I don't think any particular individual would much care if it landed near something that was potentially hostile. They'd just die. Obviously the thing has adapted a great deal of fearsome self-defense mechanism in the case that a predator does come calling, but (and I'm betraying the degree to which I think about this stuff too much) predation in an interstellar context is just stupidly inefficient. Even teeming in life, it's a mostly empty galaxy; predator species would almost certainly fail. For one thing: finding prey would be super hard!

I think this is basically right. Rorschach's presence in the Sol system was dumb fucking luck. Probably had Theseus not been sent its way, it would have continued doing whatever it was doing without really so much as acknowledging the little schmucks over on Earth. I assume that means grow big and kick out lots more Rorschachs. However when Theseus showed up, whatever defense mechanisms the thing had activated. It's just Rorschach's bad luck that it ended up in the neighborhood of a species sufficiently advanced to have created rudimentary doomsday weapons.

I think to truly annihilate it's an equal mass (the annihilation is one to one at the subatomic level). Theseus almost certainly didn't hit it with something that big; likely it was just something big enough to cause some hideously immense damage.

Keep something in mind: interstellar flight takes one of two things: vast amounts of time, or vast amounts of energy. If you're going the latter route and we're assuming something comparable to our modern understanding of physics (e.g., you're blowing up wormholes and/or playing around with Alcubierre drives) you almost necessarily have control of enough energy to destroy planets, if not stars. Which is why I speculate that, ultimately, Rorschach doesn't have anything that trumps antimatter weapons. Because I don't think you get much beyond the destructive power of antimatter without going into wacky exotic physics land.

I feel like at some point we lost the distinction between sapience and sentience in this conversation. It is the former that Rorschach/vampires lack, but the ability to operate with what would seem like intelligent data processing/threat assessment (to an observer that frames things in terms of its own sapience) is not gone. This is jarring to readers because sci fi often has that as the essential human characteristic, and the "aliens as humans in funny suits" model that is prevalent basically modifies that same sapience with an extreme of a human trait or something and suddenly it's exotic.

So Rorschach can plan, or create things that are analogous to plans to a human observer. Like Sarasti, its capacity to quickly process variables is near infinite relative to a human, so in fact it could be a very good "planner". The twist is that this accelerated super-genius function is not simply super-intelligence, but rather what lacking the burden of sapience allows a species to do. So in the most cynical read we get cave paintings and solipsism, and the vampires would be farming humans at their leisure were it not for the accident of evolution that made them infinitely vulnerable to any form of technology.

I'm not sure if everyone was talking with this in mind, or if they had a different read on it, or what. But it seemed like something we had pretty clear at one point although god knows I'm not going to upscroll it tonight.

Actually, I'm not even sure that Watts made the distinction in terminology although it seems to me he definitely was drawing the distinction in practice and theory.

It's a good distinction to make. I actually disagree with where Watts goes though; I think it's largely irrelevant, at least in terms of the interactions of star-faring species. But I acknowledge that opinion stems from me bringing a lot of my own thinking about the subject into play.

I'm aware of the particle physics of antimatter, my beef was more with the idea that you could just take a spaceship engine and go "boom now it's all antimatter" without having it immediately explode from insane amounts of electron and photon radiation from all of the constant annihilation and formation reactions during the process of converting your matter into antimatter (unless some part of the engine was always a large hunk of antimatter and I missed/forgot it). Ultimately it was a small quibble because a lot of the physics in the book is handwaved away as "vampires did it, and the math is too complex for any human to ever understand." What makes the book worthwhile is the hypothetical alien biology and genetics, not the physics of antimatter bombs or the interstellar travel (not surprising since Watts is a marine biologist, not a physicist IIRC).

Oh I agree totally; the book's portrayal of an alien is the best I've seen in basically all science fiction.

Someone mentioned in another discussion that Peter Chiang's Story of your life, a short story, was worth checking out, and I agree. He does short stories in what could be described as a fashion reminiscent more of Borges and even a bit of HG Wells than what Watts does, but he brings a lot of interesting stuff to bear in that story especially in terms of alien interactions.

I'm happy to join the Ted Chiang choir at any excuse. The collection Stories of Your Life and Others is great throughout.

The titular short story involving alien interactions and decoding is indeed good; from that collection I'm also a huge fan of "Understand" which is a riff on intelligence amplification, and exploration of what "intelligence" is and what it can cover, and what superhuman levels of it could entail.

I'll third that recommendation, though imo it's not as good as Blindsight (still an excellent story, don't get me wrong) in its portrayal of aliens, which iirc are noticeably less alien than Rorschach.

And the above got me to reread "Understand" and only strengthen my choir position for it. It's a tangential connection to Blindsight's themes, which is actually sort of a shame, because part of what makes me dig the short story so much could have been a good addition to both Blindsight's argument against sapient consciousness, as well as nice supplemental material about exactly how weird the bleeding edge of human and the difficulty of translating down from it could get.

Trying to remain non-spoilery (seriously, go read the entire collection), Understand is a story about an average fellow who suffers a traumatic trapped-under-ice type brain injury, and receives a new experimental drug/hormone/handwavium-compound treatment to regenerate the damage. Not only does he recover, it bootstraps his intelligence into superhuman levels, and Chiang takes it into some neat developments from there.

As opposed to Blindsight, "intelligence" here is very much treated as inherently self-aware, intertwined with consciousness by nature. There's not a whit of sapience posited as an epiphenomenon that hangs on as a cognitive parasite to actual intelligence. Higher intelligence is higher levels of sapience, here.

It ties into some of Blindsight's themes as well, in (appropriately enough) the theme of blind spots. Human cognition is shot through with them, and the protagonist's heightened intelligence hinges on having deeper and more complete access to areas of cognition and cognitive-supporting structures that are out of bounds to normals (to the extent of conscious access and influence of neurotransmitter levels and other nuts-and-bolts biochemistry). The climax of the story involves blind spots, and the intersection of the title with them. Neat parallels with blindsight-as-condition in general.