The ways in which we privilege the human over the non-human, the
sentient over the (seemingly) non-sentient, the intelligent over the robotic,
all come crashing down upon us when we realize that they very things that many
argue make us human (intelligence, adaptability, sentience, etc.) are aided by
things that are emphatically not (google calendar, I am looking at you). The
line between the human and non-human grows increasingly blurry, intelligence—and
its simulation or replication in non-humans—increasingly sophisticated.
Such are the ideas that circulated in my mind after completing Peter
Watts' novel Blindsight—a science fiction novel on the hard-side of the genre that explores
earth’s first contact with an intelligent but non-sentient (ponder that for a
moment) alien race. Watts, a scientist and a professor, attempts to represent
an alien race as distinct from humans in both their physical and mental
capacities. Relying upon a number of different theories, discoveries, and
philosophies from neuroscience, game theory, moral psychology, marine biology,
and information science, he crafts a world that appears far different than our
own. Humans seem to exist in a state of leisure so complete that they witness
the first encounter with an alien civilization with apathy. Floating in a
Matrix that simulates one’s private “heaven,” brains and consciousness are
distributed across a sea of data. Genetically altered and resurrected vampires
travel through space, along with post-humans and cybernetic humans. Mental
disorders are no longer classified as such, and people with multiple
personalities (a controversial mental illness in our world) are considered to
be assets.
I am not sure what to make of this
fictional world. Intriguing in all the theories and science that Watts brings
to bear on a narrative about first encounters with an alien (in every sense of
the word) civilization, the narrative seems, at times, too swollen with contemporary
scientific research that is sloppily plugged into the story’s universe (see
discussion of multiple personality disorder or, as another concept, Hemispherectomy. Yet I find myself thinking about this book far more than I have thought about
many books I have read in the past year. Perhaps because of its intriguing
exploration of the relationship between intelligence and sentience, perhaps
because of the alien’s organic base, which emits all different types of
hallucinations and illnesses of a cognitive nature, perhaps because vampires in
space makes sense…
In this article, I see Watts’ reference to the Chinese Room,
once again: the “uncanny thinking” that everyday objects, such as chat bots,
engage in. These intelligent but not sentient beings that we encounter in our
daily lives… Where do they fit in our classification of intelligence? What
rights do we afford them? Why do we sometimes feel we enter a Chinese room when
dealing with these beings online, say? Such thought experiments lead me back to
Blindsight—worth the read and the
frustration, simply because of the questions it has caused me to raise about
the nature of intelligence and the “privilege” of the human being over, well,
everything else. Perhaps, as Joichi Ito, the director of
the MIT Media Lab suggests, "Maybe we've done more damage by believing
that humans are special than we possibly could by embracing a more humble
relationship with the other creatures, objects and machines around us."
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