Blindsight (Watts novel)

• Siri Keeton is the narrator and protagonist. Debilitating brain surgery for medical purposes has cut him off from his own emotional life and made him a talented "synthesist", adept at reading others' intentions impartially with the aid of cybernetics. He is assigned to Theseus to interpret the actions of the specialized crew and report these activities to Mission Control on Earth. He comes to realize that the other crew members resent him for his role, seeing him as nosy surveillance.
• Major Amanda Bates is a combat specialist, controlling an army of robotic "grunts".
• Isaac Szpindel is the ship's primary biologist and physician. He is in love with Michelle, one of the Gang's personalities.
• Jukka Sarasti is a vampire and the crew's nominal (and frightening) leader. As a predator from the Pleistocene, he is alleged to be far smarter than baseline humans. The novel's conclusion questions to what extent Sarasti has actually led the crew.
• The Gang are four distinct personalities in the mind of one woman, the ship's linguist. They are tasked with communicating with the aliens, if possible. A single personality "surfaces" to take control of their body at any given time. The active personality reveals itself through a change in tone and posture. These personalities express offence when referred to as "alters". The personalities are:
  • Susan James, whom the others refer to as "Mom". She is the "original" personality.
  • Michelle is a shy, quiet, synaesthetic woman who is romantically involved with Szpindel.
  • Sascha is harsher and more overtly hostile towards Siri.
  • Cruncher, a male, rarely surfaces and serves as an advanced data-processing facility for James.
• Robert Cunningham, Szpindel's backup, is a secondary biologist/physician.
• The Captain is the ship's artificial intelligence. Throughout the story, the Captain remains inscrutable and mysterious, generally communicating directly only with Sarasti.

• Robert Paglino, Siri's childhood best friend and a practical example of Siri's muted emotions: Siri cannot actually feel "friendship" following his brain surgery, but intellectually knows how he is expected to behave as a friend and continues to play the part.
• Chelsea, Siri's ex-girlfriend. A professional tweaker of human personalities.
• Helen Keeton, Siri's mother, whose consciousness has been connected, brain in a vat style, to a virtual utopia called "Heaven". As a parent, she traumatized Siri with emotional demands and intrusiveness into his private life.
• Jim Moore is Siri's father, a colonel involved with planetary defense.

• Rorschach, an alien vessel or organism in low orbit around the sub-brown dwarf Big Ben. While it has a superhuman intelligence, it gradually becomes apparent that Rorschach completely lacks true consciousness or self-awareness.
• Scramblers, 9-legged anaerobic aliens that inhabit Rorschach and appear to be part of it in some sense. Like Rorschach, they are more intelligent than humans but not conscious or self-aware.

The exploration of consciousness is the central thematic element of Blindsight.[6][7][8] The title of the novel refers to the condition blindsight, in which vision is non-functional in the conscious brain but remains useful to non-conscious action.[9] Other conditions, such as Cotard delusion and Anton–Babinski syndrome, are used to illustrate differences from the usual assumptions about conscious experience.[9] The novel raises questions about the essential character of consciousness. Is the interior experience of consciousness necessary, or is externally observed behavior the sole determining characteristic of conscious experience?[6][7][9] Is an interior emotional experience necessary for empathy, or is empathic behavior sufficient to possess empathy?[9][10] Relevant to these questions is a plot element near the climax of the story, in which the vampire captain is revealed to have been controlled by the ship's artificial intelligence for the entirety of the novel.[9][11]

Philosopher John Searle's Chinese room thought experiment is used as a metaphor to illustrate the tension between the notions of consciousness as an interior experience of understanding, as contrasted with consciousness as the emergent result of merely functional non-introspective components.[6][9][11] Blindsight contributes to this debate by implying that some aspects of consciousness are empirically detectable.[7] Specifically, the novel supposes that consciousness is necessary for both aesthetic appreciation[7][8][10] and for effective communication.[7] However, the possibility is raised that consciousness is, for humanity, an evolutionary dead end.[6][9][10][11] That is, consciousness may have been naturally selected as a solution for the challenges of a specific place in space and time, but will become a limitation as conditions change or competing intelligences are encountered.[7]

The alien creatures encountered by the crew of the Theseus themselves lack consciousness.[6][7][10][12] The necessity of consciousness for effective communication is illustrated by a passage from the novel in which the linguist realizes that the alien creatures can't be, in fact, conscious because of their lack of semantic understanding:

"Tell me more about your cousins," Rorschach sent.
"Our cousins lie about the family tree," Sascha replied, "with nieces and nephews and Neanderthals. We do not like annoying cousins."
"We'd like to know about this tree."
Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? "It couldn't have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them."
"Well, it asked for clarification," Bates pointed out.
"It asked a follow-up question. Different thing entirely."[13]

The notion that these aliens could lack consciousness and possess intelligence is linked to the idea that some humans could also have diminished consciousness and remain outwardly functional.[7][8] This idea is similar to the concept of philosophical zombie, as it is understood in philosophy of mind. Blindsight supposes that sociopaths might be a manifestation of this same phenomenon,[7][9] and the demands of corporate environments might be environmental factors causing some part of humanity to evolve toward becoming philosophical zombies.[7][10]

Blindsight also explores the implications of a transhuman future.[7][11][12] Within the novel, humans no longer engage in sex with other humans for pleasure, instead choosing to use virtual reality to find idealized and submissive partners,[7] and many choose to withdraw from reality entirely by living in constructed virtual worlds, referred to as "Heaven".[7][11] Vampires are predators from humanity's distant past, resurrected through recovered DNA, and live among the humans of the late 21st century.[6][9][11][12] These vampires operate with diminished sentience presented as comparable to high-functional autism with comparable dysfunction in affect and speech, but have the advantage of multiple simultaneous thoughts occurring in parallel within their minds.[11] Enhanced pattern-matching skills comparable to some forms of autism combine with this "hyperthreading" to make them invaluable in developing unusual and often very effective approaches to solving complex problems.