Blindsight - can intelligence exist without Sentience?

[SpaceMarine93]

In Peter Watt's pessimistic hard sci-fi novel 'Blindsight', in the near future, Earth experienced an even known as 'Firefall' - in which from the depths of space a collection of unknown alien objects burn up in the Earth's atmosphere simultaneously in a grid like pattern all over the planet, accompanied by a strong radio signal.

The signal is tracked by scientists to an approaching alien vessel outside the solar system. A mission is quickly organized to send a ship out to establish contact and see what's going on. When the eccentric crew of extreme misfits arrived at the city-sized alien vessel, what they encountered exposed a disturbing new vision of the universe and their place in it.

The ending was very bleak. Without giving too much away, by the end of the story due to an epic case of Poor Communication Kills, the vastly-superior aliens are posing to attack Earth while Humanity itself back home is on the verge of tearing itself apart due to factors brought on by the catastrophic effects of advancing technology on society.

But the worst part is the overall theme as the name suggests: that life forms could become intelligent without developing sentience (or sapience), that alien intelligence without sapience might not only exist, but quite common in the cosmos, and that we might be an abbreviation for developing sentience in this cold, uncaring universe.

To put in into perspective; as the TVtropes entry explains, "Blindsight" is a real-life phenonemon where blind people whose eyes are not actually physically damaged can sometimes avoid obstacles in their path, despite not being able to consciously see them; their brain processes visual input despite the normal vision part of the brain being damaged so that they are not consciously aware of their vision.

In "Blindsight", this is used as a metaphor to differentiate between conscious and unconscious mental processing; When the characters board the alien vessel, they experience a variety of forms of Blindsight when their cognition is impaired by the ships' magnetic fields. The aliens, called Scramblers, are suspected to be non-sentient beings for whom all sensation is blindsight. This is seen in the attempts at communication during the disastrous First Contact: The Scramblers got the messages sent by Humanity, decrypted them, but due to the lack of sentience, they cannot understand out statements, especially the parts involving identity and expression of feelings.

From their POV, they assume that the message was an attempt to incapacitate them by tying up vital processing power. As such, they consider the messages, and in fact self-awareness, as an ATTACK on them, leading them to attack Earth by the end of the novel.

Watts has in essence, suggested that sapience (Feelings, empathy, self-awareness and all that) is not needed for advanced intelligence and creative thinking to develop in life-forms. As a matter of fact, it could actually be considered inefficient, tending to lead to solipsism and wasting resources on pointless endeavours like art. This is what drove the aliens to attack Earth at the end of the story.

The horror that comes from this premise is that since non-sentience itself could essentially be Evolutionary Superior, it could potentially be incredibly common in the universe, and that Humanity is an oddity, freaks, for having developed it, and thus doomed to self-destruction or destruction by others who might view sentience as a threat. After all, even a computer, if advance enough, could posess vast intelligence and do things like designing ships capable of interstellar travel, and never having to feel a damn thing.

How's that for food for thought?

[Simon_Jester]

Why do you capitalize terms like "first contact" and "evolutionary superior?"

[Losonti Tokash]

He's likely directly referencing some page on tvtropes and expecting everyone to read the deep meaning he's inferred.

[Rossum]

Well, I find the premise rather suspect. Evolution itself isn't concious of what it does and has no real "goal" aside from propagating genes that are most suited to propagating themselves (or however you say it). There isn't any particular reason to assume that the universe would favor nonsapient drones over sapient intelligent life, it doesn't care either way and it all comes down to whoever has the bigger guns.

Now, these nonsapient aliens would basically be some kind of grey goo self-replicating von neuman probes that were naturally evolved through biology.

[Starglider]

In theory, intelligence doesn't require sentience at all. There are thought experiments (e.g. AIXI) that demonstrate how given unbounded computing power, an agent can maximise its utility function to the upper bound established by its prior information. In other words for any bounded problem, infinite computing power would let you achieve the most intelligent behavior possible using a simple, non-sentient brute-force algorithm (although to be fair, AIXI-TL with a sufficiently large T and L will create vast numbers of transitory simulated sentient beings as part of the search process).

However in the real world something vaguely like human self-awareness is probably a strong attractor for evolved connectionist systems (i.e. biological creatures and biomorphic artificial intelligences). Hopefully we'll eventually have experimental evidence and a much more precise technical definition of that; for now it's pretty much a hunch.

[Connor MacLeod]

The question is: Can I convert it into a spherical mass of iron and propel it at close to light speed? Otherwise I'm uninterested.

[SpaceMarine93]

[Deleted]

[Rossum]

Well, I find the premise rather suspect. Evolution itself isn't concious of what it does and has no real "goal" aside from propagating genes that are most suited to propagating themselves (or however you say it). There isn't any particular reason to assume that the universe would favor nonsapient drones over sapient intelligent life, it doesn't care either way and it all comes down to whoever has the bigger guns.

Now, these nonsapient aliens would basically be some kind of grey goo self-replicating von neuman probes that were naturally evolved through biology. Thats sounds... unlikely because we're expected that their organic brains somehow grew to stumble upon things like technology, physics, and spacecraft without being aware of them or apparently communicating those concepts to eachother. How is the nonsapient version of Gallileo supposed to tell the nonsapient scientists around him that their planet revolves around the sun? How are they supposed to invent, design, construct, and operate all these things without any way of telling eachother apart?

Now, I can imagine nonsapient robots going around building stuff like that because a sapient inventor did all the "heavy lifting" and got all the imagination, invention, communication, and organization skills programmed into them first (and maybe gave them the ability to adapt those rules later). But to expect evolution to create something like that? Not really... that sounds way too intelligent for evolution to pull off. Or rather, even if evolution did develop some nonsapient species that dominates a planet (like say, timber wolves all joining together and killing all their cometeting species before humans evolved from apes) I doubt they would ever develop space flight or get technology superior to us.

Most (if not all) of human technology was created because some person out there got an idea, invested resources into producing it, and then invented it and marketed it. There were countless potential inventors in history and only a fraction of them succeeded at making their inventions well known. Things like fire and balistics are fairly low hanging fruit as far as technologies go, building fully functional space ships are absurdly cost consuming and difficult. I can't imagine a race of blindsighted aliens taking over a planet and then having the know-how and ambition to pour resources into space travel and succeed at it.

The human condition of self-awareness has resulted in a huge variety of human personalities and viewpoints. Some of those human personalities are smart enough to build technologies, carve nations, and do whatever and get followers to go along with them. Its a huge messy system but has produced the variety and eccentricity needed to get someone who wanted to build spaceflight and then have others go along with them to succeed at it.

A species that is not self-aware wouldn't have the variety of viewpoints to ever think about traveling to space or be insane enough to pour resources into accomplishing that task.

Oh, and as for the aliens flipping out because the concepts of individuality wastes processing power... I'm pretty sure back on their home placet somebody would have discovered that and exploited it for whatever reason. Human biology kind of favors those who are smart or social enough to manipulate their fellows and then steal all the women and glory at the end.


Soo... in short:

1. Biology tends to favor self-aware creatures because they are smart and sneaky enough to screw over nonsapient ones and steal all the resources and mates. (Basically, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." and since the one-eyed snake is a dick, he'll screw everyone else over and the later generations are more likely to be self aware as a result).

2. While it is possible for a nonsapient intelligent race to exist... that would pretty much require the whole race be united and working together like ants in a hive or robots in a freaky sci-fi robot collective without any of the above "one-eyed snakes" screwing everyone else over. I can imagine an intelligent inventor designing a "perfect world" like that but I can't imagine evolution being smart enough to pull it off.



I suppose its possible for a eusocial race (like ants, wasps, bees or naked mole rats) to become a dominant species on a planet without gaining self-awareness but thats just because their reproduction consists of one Queen churning out lots of worker drones. Their reproductive diversity isn't diverse enough for "one-eyed snakes" to introduce self-awareness into the species. But on the other side, expecting such a species to make the cognitive leaps necessary for space travel is improbable.


The only way I can imagine this working is if a normally self-aware species arises, the go through generations of dicking eachother around until sufficiently intelligent ones arrive. Then one of the intelligent ones designs some kind of mind-control thing to turn everyone else into non-sapient drones to carry out his tasks. Or link everyone together like the Borg or whatever. I don't have any problem with Nonsapient intelligent machines doing stuff, or having say a race of Borg running around building ships and taking over the universe with no individuals in it. But that assumes that some intelligent mind put together a system to make sure all the drones are doing the stuff they need to advance the species.


(sorry, hit the 'submit' button by accident)

[Lord of the Abyss]

Now, these nonsapient aliens would basically be some kind of grey goo self-replicating von neuman probes that were naturally evolved through biology. Thats sounds... unlikely because we're expected that their organic brains somehow grew to stumble upon things like technology, physics, and spacecraft without being aware of them or apparently communicating those concepts to eachother. How is the nonsapient version of Gallileo supposed to tell the nonsapient scientists around him that their planet revolves around the sun? How are they supposed to invent, design, construct, and operate all these things without any way of telling eachother apart?

They communicate; they just don't communicate using terms involving emotion or awareness. It's just data.

Now, I can imagine nonsapient robots going around building stuff like that because a sapient inventor did all the "heavy lifting" and got all the imagination, invention, communication, and organization skills programmed into them first (and maybe gave them the ability to adapt those rules later). But to expect evolution to create something like that? Not really... that sounds way too intelligent for evolution to pull off.

You misunderstand; evolution didn't develop their technology; they did. They just did it without being consciously aware of anything. It's all data processing.

Oh, and as for the aliens flipping out because the concepts of individuality wastes processing power... I'm pretty sure back on their home placet somebody would have discovered that and exploited it for whatever reason. Human biology kind of favors those who are smart or social enough to manipulate their fellows and then steal all the women and glory at the end.

Part of the theme of the book is that nonsentients are smarter, in part because they aren't "wasting processing power" the way sentients do.

[Purple]

I think you are missing the point of what he tried to explain. He said that non sentients as would be less likely to develop that technology because sentience is the drive that leads creatures to develop technology in the first place. A creature that is not self aware will not think about how to make its own life easier. Nor will it think of how to get rich off making other creatures lives easier. And thus it will not come to the idea of streamlining a process. Instead it will just go through the motions mechanically, newer improving or changing a thing. An ant or industrial robot (which ever you prefer) can do quite ingenious things. But they can't think of new things to do or new ways to do it.

That is at least how I understood Rossum.

[Rossum]

I think you are missing the point of what he tried to explain. He said that non sentients as would be less likely to develop that technology because sentience is the drive that leads creatures to develop technology in the first place. A creature that is not self aware will not think about how to make its own life easier. Nor will it think of how to get rich off making other creatures lives easier. And thus it will not come to the idea of streamlining a process. Instead it will just go through the motions mechanically, newer improving or changing a thing. An ant or industrial robot (which ever you prefer) can do quite ingenious things. But they can't think of new things to do or new ways to do it.

That is at least how I understood Rossum.

Yeah, thats pretty much it.

Why would nonsapients ever invent radio if non of them care to listen to music (and non of them can sing) and any news it might give them could just as easily be told to them at the daily meal they share in their hives or whatever?

Right now we are on a bulletin board that was set up so people could debate about Star Wars and Star Trek. Would non-sapients have developed either of those two franchises or even care about debating them if they did? Would they have invented guns when they are presumably the dominant species on the planet and don't fight eachother? Would they develop cars when they already have perfectly serviceable horses (or rickshaws)? Would they develop nuclear power for bombs or for power generation when they don't go to war with eachother or waste loads of energy on businesses, advertising, electric heating, and other things?


My basic point is that while other species on our planet have adapted over the generations to better survive attacks from predators, disease, and the elements. Humans have been adapting to survive other humans. While our individuality and emotion drive humans to do stupid things like start wars, lie to eachother, use up valuable petrolium to make plastic baby dolls that wet themselves, and do other stuff... its those very things that create the demand for engineers and scientists to invent new things.

If humanity wasn't as collectively retarded, untrustworthy, and insane as we are... we never would have had the demand to invent all the guns, computers, vehicles, and space ships that we have. We'd probably be a race of wood elves or whatever living at one with nature, being totally honest and trustworthy, and only doing what we need in order to further our races survival.


Soo... technology advances because engineers and inventors work to solve problems. A race of nonsapients intelligent beings would behave rationally and not cause problems. While they might be able to collectively solve all the problems that their environment gives them, their lack of individuality would result in them "running out of problems" and thus getting stuck in a rut with no need or desire to solve the problems necessary to accomplish spaceflight.

If we do ever encounter a race of intelligent nonsapients, I imagine they would either consist of some magically wonderful Elves living in a perfect world somewhere at one with nature and never bothering to leave their planet... or they would be a huge Borg-like spacefaring race that used to be sapient but has since then made themselves nonsapient in order to increase their efficiency and productivity.

[mr friendly guy]

So basically the idea of these aliens is a variation of the Chinese room thought experiment?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Room

[Starglider]

So basically the idea of these aliens is a variation of the Chinese room thought experiment?

In spirit perhaps but not in detail. Searle did and AFAIK still does take an aggressively ignorant attitude to the key functional elements of cognitive architecture. Chinese Room focused on irrelevant implementation detail; the Penrose mistake of believing that analog neurons are magically sentient but anything that uses discrete symbols, even an exact simulation of a human brain accurate to 40 decimal places, must only be a 'fascimile' of consciousness. The actual consciousness vs non-sentient distinction centers around the system's reflective model, its world/self embedding model and the goal system design (content and implementation). Connectionist designs still have these features, they're just spread out into the typical mushy messy connectionist blobs.

[jollyreaper]

I don't really buy it either.

In the philosophy of consciousness, "sentience" can refer to the ability of any entity to have subjective perceptual experiences, or "qualia".[1] This is distinct from other aspects of the mind and consciousness, such as creativity, intelligence, sapience, self-awareness, and intentionality (the ability to have thoughts that mean something or are "about" something). Sentience is a minimalistic way of defining "consciousness", which is otherwise commonly used to collectively describe sentience plus other characteristics of the mind.

Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts.[1] It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.[2] Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.[3] As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."[4]

How do these things even develop starships if they don't have any consciousness or desire? What is their motivation?

I had the same problem with Scalzi's consciousless aliens in Old Man's War. If they have no sense of individuality and personal identity, how did they ever reach the point of deciding they wanted it in the first place? It's like an asexual who has no desire for physical intimacy and is quite comfortable being alone to suddenly decide he wants sex.

[Simon_Jester]

So basically the idea of these aliens is a variation of the Chinese room thought experiment?

In spirit perhaps but not in detail. Searle did and AFAIK still does take an aggressively ignorant attitude to the key functional elements of cognitive architecture. Chinese Room focused on irrelevant implementation detail; the Penrose mistake of believing that analog neurons are magically sentient but anything that uses discrete symbols, even an exact simulation of a human brain accurate to 40 decimal places, must only be a 'fascimile' of consciousness.

I wonder what they'd think of a giant brain-computer built out of analog vacuum tubes...

[jollyreaper]

I'm 77% of the way into this. Really enjoying the story.

I'm not sure if the writer will even get around to conjecturing where the aliena came from and how they could be but the exploration and questions concerning what our protagonists see is fascinating. It really feels like a take on At the Mountains of Madness as seen through a post-human filter.

There are some novels that start with an interesting premise but have a pedestrian execution. There are others that get so caught up in being deliberately clever that they lose track of the premise. This one is threading it finely, pushing hard but not overstepping. Very difficult to do. The Rorschach entity is alien enough to be terrifying without feeling like it was deliberately constructed to frighten humans. It feels like it simply is and whether or not it scares us is if no concern.

I do have to admit that my mind has trouble wrapping around such real things as beehives and termite mounds, elaborate reproductive cycles, all sorts of things that are evolved in nature and without purpose and yet defy belief. But there is quite a gap between a termite mound and an interstellar vehicle. Or is there? Big questions to be contemplated. Good stuff.

[NoXion]

I've read this story and I enjoyed it a fair bit - very thought-provoking.

For me, the non-sapient intelligence of the Blindsight aliens was more in the science fiction tradition of reminding us ("us" in this case being both the readers as well as the society in the story) that we're not some kind of pinnacle of the evolutionary process, because evolution doesn't have any teleological element to it. Given that evolution starts off with non-sentient replicators in the first place, I don't find it that much of a stretch to imagine that somewhere in the universe a form of life has developed that can process input and react in a manner conducive to survival and even expansion, but do so without any subjective experience whatsoever. From what I remember (it's been a while since I read it admittedly) the Blindsight aliens certainly don't seem to come from an environment that we would recognise as Earth-like.

What stretched my suspension of disbelief more than the aliens was the somewhat lackadaisical reaction of people back on Earth (could be misremembering); not only have they discovered aliens, but their mindset is something completely orthogonal to anthropoid intelligence! I don't like the "aliens are discovered/revealed, all/most of humanity goes fucking apeshit" theme either, but I think this story went too far the other way. Earth is a big planet - you're going to get a wide array of reactions, ranging from "meh" to "AAARGH KILL THEM NOW" and everything in between.

[Terralthra]

So basically the idea of these aliens is a variation of the Chinese room thought experiment?

In spirit perhaps but not in detail. Searle did and AFAIK still does take an aggressively ignorant attitude to the key functional elements of cognitive architecture. Chinese Room focused on irrelevant implementation detail; the Penrose mistake of believing that analog neurons are magically sentient but anything that uses discrete symbols, even an exact simulation of a human brain accurate to 40 decimal places, must only be a 'fascimile' of consciousness. The actual consciousness vs non-sentient distinction centers around the system's reflective model, its world/self embedding model and the goal system design (content and implementation). Connectionist designs still have these features, they're just spread out into the typical mushy messy connectionist blobs.

Searle makes an even more basic mistake in asking whether the man in the Chinese Room could be said to be fluent in Chinese due to passing a Turing test in Chinese by following a manual giving simple response logic, despite being completely unskilled in Chinese. This is akin to asking if a single neuron inside your brain knows English because your whole brain/body system can respond to English input with properly formed English output. While the man's fluency in Chinese is obviously false, the system of the Room, the man, the manual, and the input/output is clearly fluent in Chinese, by any practical (ie falsifiable) measure.

The interesting question he skips in making his leap to his predetermined conclusion is "where does the fluency originate in the system?", to which the most reasonable answer is "the knowledge of the people that wrote the manual, combined with the cognitive ability (pattern matching, look-up, crafting the response) of the man." Obviously, to pass the Turing test, the manual of Chinese must be fairly complex, an idea Searle omits from his laughable thought experiment.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

Sweet necromancing Jesus.

[Broomstick]

Now, these nonsapient aliens would basically be some kind of grey goo self-replicating von neuman probes that were naturally evolved through biology.

Not really "goo", and I think the book is open enough that Scramblers might have originally been engineered by sapients but then further evolved on their own.

I say this due to Watts' "vampires", which also appear in the book, being genetically engineered intelligences that are just as or more intelligent than humans but arguably less sapient (although not as non-sapient as the Scramblers)

[Dalton]

Sweet necromancing Jesus.

There's no real reason to close this thread for necromancy.

[Junghalli]

I think you are missing the point of what he tried to explain. He said that non sentients as would be less likely to develop that technology because sentience is the drive that leads creatures to develop technology in the first place. A creature that is not self aware will not think about how to make its own life easier. Nor will it think of how to get rich off making other creatures lives easier.

Why would nonsapients ever invent radio if non of them care to listen to music (and non of them can sing) and any news it might give them could just as easily be told to them at the daily meal they share in their hives or whatever?

Right now we are on a bulletin board that was set up so people could debate about Star Wars and Star Trek. Would non-sapients have developed either of those two franchises or even care about debating them if they did?

I also am skeptical of the Blindsight proposition, but I don't really see this objection.

It really seems to me "making my life easier" is pretty obviously correlated with "things that would increase my Darwinian fitness". Antibiotics and modern medicine "make my life easier" and allow me to resist diseases better and hence have more offspring and have more of them survive to breeding age themselves. The modern food system "makes my life easier" and reduces my chances of starving to death and hence being eliminated from the gene pool. Labor-saving devices "make my life easier" and allow me to get more return from less calories, making starvation less of a threat, and also reduces the wear and tear on my body allowing me to remain healthier. If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Human preferences were shaped by evolution, so of course it makes sense we'd desire things that increase fitness, and as we developed intelligence and technology we used it to get at those things. Admittedly the correlation is far from perfect, because humans are adaptation executers not fitness maximizers (which is why invented condoms and create message boards for discussing fictional entities blowing each other up), but I don't see why a hypothetical nonsentient but highly intelligent creature wouldn't have its own set of adaptations that it would be attracted to using intelligence and technology to more effectively execute. They would look different from ours, of course, but they would be shaped by the same basic evolutionary dynamics that lead to humans liking the idea of having lots of liesure and luxury and high status and not dying.

Where I look at Blindsight's thesis funny is the idea that being nonsentient is somehow an advantage in an intelligent creature. Being able to recognize your own mind and body as a thing strikes me as pretty useful, and I can't offhand think of any other definition of "self-awareness" there is that doesn't reduce to vague philosophical or mystical handwaving.

[jollyreaper]

Now, these nonsapient aliens would basically be some kind of grey goo self-replicating von neuman probes that were naturally evolved through biology.

Not really "goo", and I think the book is open enough that Scramblers might have originally been engineered by sapients but then further evolved on their own.

I say this due to Watts' "vampires", which also appear in the book, being genetically engineered intelligences that are just as or more intelligent than humans but arguably less sapient (although not as non-sapient as the Scramblers)

The vampires were not created but resurrected from DNA, Jurassic Park rather than HAL 9000.

As a personal quibble, I would have preferred the vampire idea be explored in a separate novel and the vampires in the story actually be deliberately engineered psychopaths optimized for superior cogitation without moral ramifications. That they often happen to enjoy killing for pleasure would be a side effect. But this is really just a quibble. I prefer a conservation of paranormal ideas in fiction. If we've got werewolves, I don't want aliens. If we've got aliens, I don't want ghosts. Unless the setting really justifies genre chop-suey.

But the whole thing brings me back to psychopaths in general and how they can mimic emotional responses and be charming without actually feeling the motivation. Our narrator is in similar straights for different reasons.

It also reminds me of the observation one hapless geek made about his own love life: "There's something wrong when serial killers have more of a love life than I do."

[Broomstick]

The vampires were not created but resurrected from DNA, Jurassic Park rather than HAL 9000.

And that recreation somehow didn't involve genetic engineering....?

For anyone intrigued by Watt's vampires, here is a link to a faux corporate presentation on them.

It also reminds me of the observation one hapless geek made about his own love life: "There's something wrong when serial killers have more of a love life than I do."

Oddly enough, in the Starfish/Maelstrom/Behemoth trilogy Watts has a that sort of character as a significant part of the last novel.

I have some issues with that trilogy, too, yet I still enjoyed reading through all that.

[jollyreaper]

Some generic engineering, just like the Jurassic Park dinos. But that's different from ginning them up from nothing. Resurrected species vs someone deciding hey, wouldn't it be neat to invent vampires from base human stock?

Anyway, I'm intrigued to read more of his work. I don't mind having issues as long as they're something worth talking about rather than just shaking heads sadly over.

The original terminator was presented as an intelligent, unconscious enemy. There's not really anything organic to analogize it to like a person or a shark. It's more like a sophisticated cruise missile. But being able to pass as human under casual scrutiny yet still having that relentless cruise missile demeanor, as much luck negotiating with it as a time bomb, that's scary. And that's the same category these aliens fall into. Scary.