Author: Yin Rong
"What is the use of self-awareness?"
In 2006, Canadian science fiction writer Peter Watts completed his new work, Blind Vision, after he had established his place in the hard science fiction world because of the "crack trilogy", and this new book was the proud work he poured his energy into. Unexpectedly, however, six of the seven major science fiction publishing houses in the United States directly refused to publish after reading the manuscript, and the only one was still because of the contract with Watts and could only do things according to the rules.
After the book was published, the sales were extremely poor, and Watts was desperate but unwilling, so he published the novel in its entirety on his website and gave it to science fiction fans around the world for free (to be precise, science fiction fans with English reading ability). Then the most clichéd plot happened: people first talked about it in the small circle of science fiction, and then gradually broke the circle, and even the paper books were sold out and reprinted.
The reason why no publisher was willing to take orders in the beginning was probably for two reasons, one is that the story direction of this book is too sad and desperate, and the image point is that if you want to make yourself negative, you may wish to read this book; or if you are resentful of human society, this book is probably just right for you.
Another important reason is that the density of various science fiction concepts in the book is too crazy, transforming people, brain-computer interfaces, virtual worlds, consciousness uploading, loss of five senses, vampires, sympathetic disorders, extraterrestrial civilizations, alien creatures, visual blind spots, multiple personalities, artificial intelligence, self-awareness, evolutionary trees... Fully understanding these concepts requires a great energy drain, and many settings have to be read several times to figure them out.
Of course, if you're a science fiction enthusiast, especially if you happen to prefer works that involve biological themes, this book will give you a frequent sense of comfort when you touch the hi-pop during massage, but obviously for the average reader, the reading experience of this book will not be very friendly. What exactly the story of the book tells, the next start of spoilers.
In the story, the future society has entered the cyber world with highly developed science and technology, human beings have a powerful neurobiological transformation technology, artificial intelligence is highly developed, and "transformed people" can easily surpass "standard humans" in terms of designated capabilities. People can also choose to abandon the real world and transmit their self-awareness to a virtual space, as if they were soaring into heaven. One day, an extraterrestrial civilization suddenly visited Earth and hurried away before humanity could slow down. In order to find out the purpose of the aliens, humans sent an adventure team to outer space a few light-years away to explore extraterrestrial civilization creations as large as meteorites.
And the composition of the entire squad is a complete illustration of the worldview of this future world:
Serry, the first-person narrator of the story, was cut off half of his brain at a young age due to epilepsy, and has since lost normal human feelings, but he has also been able to observe things from a completely objective point of view like a machine, without any personal subjective prejudices, and is a real "objective monster". At the same time, he can also analyze the various words, expressions and body movements of others intentionally or unintentionally, and gain insight into their true thoughts. Serry's mission on the ship is to record everything he has seen and heard on the journey and report the information to Earth.
Salasti, squad leader, vampire. This legendary species has existed since ancient times, they have a more developed brain neocortex and more powerful physical functions than humans, and they are natural predators. Vampires were supposed to be the most adaptable primates, rulers of earth, but they were played a tragic joke by fate. Because the optic and sympathetic nerves intersect, vampires suffer from "vertical syndrome", and they can induce epilepsy or stroke as soon as they see a right-angle object, which is not a big problem, after all, there are few absolute right angles in nature. But Europeans later founded Christianity, and the cross symbol led to the extinction of vampires. At the end of the 21st century, humans coveted the ability of vampires and used biotechnology to revive vampires.
James, the linguist, the modified multi-personality, has four self-conscious personalities that are independent of each other, which can not only switch freely at will, but also talk and cooperate with each other, "they" have mastered the grammatical paradigms of all languages in human history, and can understand all the rules of communication.
Spencer, a biologist, whose sensory system has been drastically modified, whose eyes, ears, nose, and mouth have all been replaced by extended devices, has not only greatly improved various sensory functions, but also has synesthesia, which can "see" the shape of the data, "touch" the touch of ultrasound, and "hear" infrared sounds.
Bates, a combat expert, is proficient in various tactics and combat scenarios, and can also control mechanical soldiers through his own consciousness at any time.
Theseus, the expedition ship in which the adventure squad rides. Possessing artificial intelligence that can complete reasoning that humans cannot understand, it is called "captain", and it and the vampire Salaste can be interconnected through neural cables to achieve "intelligent hybridization".
The main story of the novel revolves around the contact process between this detective team composed of modified humans, vampires, robots and artificial intelligence and extraterrestrial civilizations. The meteorite resembles a giant intelligent being that calls itself "Rorschach", and in the course of communicating with Rorschach, linguist James discovers that Rorschach is essentially just a "language machine", that it is conscious but not self-aware. The vampires lead the squad deep into Rorschach, and after a battle of devastated soldiers, they succeed in capturing the alien creature inside Rorschach, the Climber.
As they studied the climbers, the team discovered something strange: the alien creatures, though possessing the intelligence to crush humans, had no "self-awareness" like Rorschach, such as describing "body locked up" instead of "I" being locked up if they were locked up; if their legs were injured, they described "leg wounds" instead of "I" leg wounds. They are like super artificial intelligences, which can do all kinds of complex work, but they are not aware of the existence of the "self".
After in-depth investigation, the squad members finally came to an important conclusion: "self-awareness" is only a product of a certain stage of life evolution, and its initial reason for emergence is to help organisms reasonably concentrate and allocate attention, but when the organism's nervous system develops to a more developed level, their thoughts and behaviors no longer need the participation of "I", and the auxiliary tool of "self-awareness" should be eliminated.
This process should have taken place tens of thousands of years ago, and the germ has already emerged: vampires have no "sense of self" and are best qualified to be the frontrunners of intelligent life on Earth. But the accident led to the extinction of vampires, Homo sapiens (that is, modern humans) came to power, and intelligent evolution was unfortunately interrupted. Since then, human beings have been kidnapped by the "self-consciousness" in the brain, and the upward channels have been difficult.
It's like if a computer's memory only stays at the "kilobyte" (kb) level, no matter how the operating system, central processing unit, cooling fan, and motherboard are upgraded, it is difficult for the computer to make a qualitative leap in performance. In the end, human beings are a group of psychopaths who have strayed from the evolutionary tree, and as the only backward intelligent race in the universe that may still be saddled with the burden of self-awareness, they are bound to perish in competition.
At the end of the story, the captured climbers flee back to Rorschach, where they were deliberately caught in order to get a closer look at humans. Rorschach also implanted a new personality in the linguist James, inducing her to rebel and seize power. In the end, Salasti and the "Captain" pilot the spacecraft and killed Rorschach with an antimatter bomb, and Serray, as the only survivor, drifts to Earth in an escape pod.
He listened to the broadcast from Earth, and found that as time passed, there was less and less "artistic" component in the broadcast, and finally the radio on Earth was left with only traffic information. Since art is a self-conscious expression of emotion, Serry speculates that vampires have ruled the earth and that humans have chosen to fall asleep in the "virtual paradise" of a computer-simulated world. Serena became the last on Earth, even the last in the universe, and self-aware beings.
Peter Watts has a brilliant discussion of antisocial personality, empathy, morality, virtual reality, cognitive strategies of the brain, and the ecological strategy of vampires. Even in his official website, as if he wrote an academic paper, he made an illustrated description of the energy drive of spaceships, the physiological structure of vampires, the physiological structure of extraterrestrial creatures, and the forms of extraterrestrial civilization creations. But it is undeniable that the most core and energetic idea of the whole novel is the exploration of self-awareness.
In fact, human fascination with the "self" has indeed reached a morbid level, and many of our mental mechanisms are actually to make ourselves feel good, to "modify" selfish goals. From the perspective of modern evolutionary psychology, our behavior is driven by emotional emotions, such as the feeling that the individual will feel throbbing after encountering the right mating partner, which will cause him to pursue the other; when he encounters a beast or a poisonous snake, he will feel fear, which will drive him to flee the scene as soon as possible; if he is deceived, he will feel angry, this feeling will make him retaliate against the deceiver; if he is grateful for the help of others in a difficult time, this feeling will prompt him to reciprocate to the helper in the future.
All of these emotions are "ego" feelings, and their role is to act as intermediaries between genetic interests and behaviors. That is, evolution has given humans a set of devices that allow us to generate emotions in specific stimulus situations, which in turn trigger various adaptive behaviors, the results of which serve the genetic interests of individuals. But at the same time, the intermediary itself will also occupy a lot of brain resources, which is equivalent to a middleman there is a price difference, or the more complex the management, the less efficient the administration.
Intelligence does not equal self-awareness. Many artificial intelligences have performed far beyond the human level when performing certain tasks, they have intelligence but do not have a sense of self, and artificial intelligence will not be aware of its own existence. Many neuroscience studies have found that our brains have actually completed decisions before we are aware of the outcome of our decisions, so self-awareness is not involved in the decision-making process. But since self-consciousness does nothing, why do humans have to be self-aware? Modern science can explain how the brain works, and can accurately describe how the various brain regions of the brain work together when a person reasons, recalls, reads, or listens to music, but it cannot explain why we are self-aware.
In many traditional science fiction works, what we are accustomed to seeing is the creator's hidden worry about the development of artificial intelligence: what impact will artificial intelligence have on human society after it has self-awareness? In Blind Eye, Peter Watts does the opposite, and his question becomes: What is the use of self-awareness? The prideful sense of self that humans are proud of may have been just an aid in the evolutionary process, and with the passage of time, it has become an obstacle to the development of intelligence to a higher stage. This "burden" is only for its own comfort, it constantly consumes resources, but does not produce anything. Intelligence rushes forward, while self-awareness drags its feet.
Instead, the unself-aware vampireSalasty and captain (artificial intelligence on Theseus' ship) in the book have greater abilities, having greater information capacity, faster response, higher productivity, more accurate judgment, and more reasonable decision-making. And because they have no self-awareness, these two intellectuals can merge with each other without any obstacles, as Serena describes, "We are just pawns." Salasti and the captain— whatever intelligence they have crossed into — are the real chess players. ”
Interestingly, a few years after the publication of Blind Vision, Peter Watts gave a solution in his sequel Echopraxia: through brain-computer interface technology, the brains are interconnected between individuals, so that each brain is like a neuron, through the cooperation between countless brains, developing a higher level of "swarm intelligence" that cannot be understood by a single brain. Unfortunately, because the content of this book is too difficult, no publishing house in China has the courage to translate and introduce it.
The big names in this issue
Doctor of Psychology, research directions are evolutionary psychology, social psychology. He loves popular science writing, likes lively, humorous and a little spit expression, pursues a writing style of "rigorous and popular, both scientific and interesting", and has authored "From Ape Nature to Human Nature: The Most Perfect Script in the History of Life" (currently the book has a Douban score of 9.3 points). When he was young, he was addicted to Japanese comics, and he still did not repent; he was a self-proclaimed fan of movies, a science fiction enthusiast, and occasionally wrote film reviews and book reviews of science fiction reviews.
More exciting content is available in the Panda Lattice - Big Coffee Study