Blindsight

Peter Watts' Blindsight was suggested to me by a friend at work, when I was waxing lyrical about Charles Stross's science fiction - he had similar opinions about Watts' work. And I have to agree that Blindsight is an extremely smart novel. In a lot of ways it is more a meditation on the nature of sentience and consciousness than it is a novel. It looks closelt at the latest neuroscience to try to examine what it is to be sentient - why it is we are self-aware, and what that means. It does this by involving the characters in first contact with an alien race - one of the more convincingly alien races I have read about.


It's less convincing as a story than it is as a vehicle for ideas. The characters are unlikeable and emotionally damaged in many ways. I got most of the way through the book before I could tell two of them apart - whenever they were mentioned, I had to stop to try and work out which of the two was being talked about. The descriptions of the various spacecraft were quite confusing as well - the geometry of the main spaceship, the Theseus, was frequently discussed throughout the book, as the characters moved through it, but I still couldn't picture it.

Even so, it's a worthwhile read. I don't think I've been pushed to think about these things quite so hard by any novel before. It's particularly interesting with respect to my studies - these issues are important to understanding the ways that people create knowledge - we have a lot of theories, but we still don't really understand how people learn. To understand how people learn is not only a neuroscientific issue; it is about what makes us who we are, and what the self is.