6.8 KiB
[HSF] Blindsight by Peter Watts (p-vampires and hard sci-fi)
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Author: u/traverseda With dread but cautious optimism*
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Score: 18
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Created: 2014-08-02T23:25:44
Post:
Comments:
u/traverseda [+10] With dread but cautious optimism (an hour later)
The sequel, echopraxia, is out.
All those gut feelings, right or wrong, that had kept the breed alive on the Pleistocene savannah—and they were wrong, so much of the time. False negatives, false positives, the moral algebra of fat men pushed in front of onrushing trolleys. The strident emotional belief that children made you happy, even when all the data pointed to misery. The high-amplitude fear of sharks and dark-skinned snipers who would never kill you; indifference to all the toxins and pesticides that could. The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision—and should some brain-lesioned mother abandon her baby in a burning house in order to save two strangers from the same fire, the rest of the world would be more likely to call her a monster than laud the rationality of her lifeboat ethics. Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will.
Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.
Fossil feelings. Better off without them, once you’d outgrown the savannah and decided that Truth mattered after all. But Humanity wasn’t defined by arms and legs and upright posture. Humanity had evolved at the synapse as well as at the opposable thumb—and those misleading gut feelings were the very groundwork on which the whole damn clade had been built. Capuchins felt empathy. Chimps had an innate sense of fair play. You could look into the eyes of any cat or dog and see a connection there, a legacy of common subroutines and shared emotions.
The Bicamerals had cut away all that kinship in the name of something their stunted progenitors called Truth, and replaced it with—something else. They might look human. Their cellular metabolism might lie dead on the Kleiber curve. But to merely call them a cognitive subspecies was denial to the point of delusion. The wiring in those skulls wasn’t even mammalian anymore. A look into those sparkling eyes would show you nothing but—
u/Rangi42 [+3] (2 days later)
Another couple excerpts:
All animals are under stringent selection pressure to be as stupid as they can get away with.
—Pete Richerson and Robert Boyd
Ultimately, all science is correlation. No matter how effectively it may use one variable to describe another, its equations will always ultimately rest upon the surface of a black box. (Saint Herbert might have put it most succinctly when he observed that all proofs inevitably reduce to propositions that have no proof.) The difference between Science and Faith, therefore, is no more and no less than predictive power. Scientific insights have proven to be better predictors than Spiritual ones, at least in worldly matters; they prevail not because they are true, but simply because they work.
The Bicameral Order represents a stark anomaly in this otherwise consistent landscape. Their explicitly faith-based methodologies venture unapologetically into metaphysical realms that defy empirical analysis—yet they yield results with consistently more predictive power than conventional science. (How they do this is not known; our best evidence suggests some kind of rewiring of the temporal lobe in a way that amplifies their connection to the Divine.)
It would be dangerously naïve to regard this as a victory for traditional religion. It is not. It is a victory for a radical sect barely half a century old, and the cost of that victory has been to demolish the wall between Science and Faith. The Church’s concession of the physical realm informed the historic armistice that has allowed faith and reason to coexist to this day. One may find it heartening to see faith ascendant once again across the Human spectrum; but it is not our faith. Its hand still guides lost sheep away from the soulless empiricism of secular science, but the days in which it guided them into the loving arms of Our Savior are waning.
—An Enemy Within: The Bicameral Threat to Institutional Religion in the Twenty-First Century (An Internal Report to the Holy See by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 2093)
u/krakonfour [+1] (14 hours later)
I'm guessing it isn't available for free online, like Blindsight is.
u/traverseda [+3] With dread but cautious optimism (20 hours later)
Not like blindsight is, no.
u/krakonfour [+0] (21 hours later)
Well, at least it sounds like something I'd dish out cash for.
Thanks.
u/FeepingCreature [+1] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (15 hours later)
Are you sure it's out? Amazon shows it for preorder.
u/traverseda [+3] With dread but cautious optimism (20 hours later)
I'm reading it right now....
Admittedly I didn't buy it.
u/FeepingCreature [+1] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (21 hours later)
I did not realize this was an option. Brb.
(Hey, it's not like I'm not precommitted to buying it anyways...)
u/traverseda [+2] With dread but cautious optimism (21 hours later)
I'm a fan of #bookz on undernet.
u/sullyj3 [+4] (14 hours later)
What on earth is a p-vampire?
u/phobiac [+2] (16 hours later)
I don't know what OP means but this a (spoiler free, mostly) primer from the author. http://www.rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm
u/traverseda [+2] With dread but cautious optimism (20 hours later)
Like a p-zombie.
u/libertarian_reddit [+1] (3 days later)
I think he wants to know what the hell the "p" means.
u/acinonys [+1] (5 days later)
u/gabbalis [+0] (3 days later)
I vant to suck your qualia!
u/Rangi42 [+2] (2 days later)
Starfish, also by Peter Watts, is not exactly rationalist fiction but it does deal with rationalist themes. For instance, the "shut up and multiply" utilitarian approach to ethics and its consequences; the difficulty of getting a powerful optimizer to Do What You Mean, not what you literally said; and factions "defined and driven into conflict by their beliefs and values."