A rare specimen of damn strong science fiction, without the slightest bows toward adventure literature. Watts is a marine biologist by training, and it shows: the book is packed with scientific concepts so densely that at the end the author attached several pages of bibliography.
Setup
When thousands of probes suddenly appeared in Earth’s orbit, recorded its surface, and immediately burned up, humanity learned: we are not alone. The ship Theseus sets out for the source of the signal at the edge of the Solar System. The crew is a team of modified people, each of whom is already not quite human: a linguist with a split personality, a cyborg soldier, a biologist with synthetic sense organs. They are commanded by a resurrected vampire, not as a metaphor, but literally: in Watts’s world, vampires existed as a predator species, died out in antiquity, and were restored by genetic engineering.
Main Question
Is self-awareness a requirement for intelligence? Watts offers a frightening hypothesis: consciousness is not the crown of evolution, but an expensive bug. A parasite that eats the brain’s resources and slows reactions. A being can be intelligent, solve complex problems, even hold a conversation, and still not be aware of itself at all. Like a philosophical zombie, only real.
The aliens of Blindsight are exactly like that. They demonstrate intelligence, but it is impossible to understand them, because understanding implies at least some shared experience. And what experience can we have in common with a being without an inner world?
Why This Matters
In the age of LLMs, the book sounds prophetic. ChatGPT holds a conversation, solves problems, but is it aware of itself? Watts wrote Blindsight in 2006, long before the neural-network boom, but the question remains the same: what does it mean to understand? What does it mean to be someone?
The book is not for everyone: dense, dark, with nonlinear narration and a narrator who has had half his brain removed. But if you are interested in the philosophy of consciousness, neurobiology, and truly alien contact, it is required reading.
Watts put the book online for free on his site, rifters.com, a rare gesture for an author of that level.