>>1815430>Watts understanding of human evolution is lacking.What absolute fucking arrogance to say this about a professional marine biologist. Reading this line, I knew that the wall of text would be one of two things: either an insightful critique by another knowledgeable expert, or a comically over-confident screed by someone whose entire understanding of evolution was absorbed from a handful of undergrad lectures. What a disappointing post.
I will never understand what is it about the concept of evolution that leads laypeople to arrogantly think their casual encounters with the topic qualify them to opine so confidently about it.
>Meteorologist discusses a hypothetical weather phenomenon>It's not consistent with my understanding of weather>Clearly the meteorologist doesn't understand weather!That's you. You need to have some humility you little shit, the fact that your understanding of evolution contradicts a goddamn biologist should have led you to question YOUR understanding, not the biologist's.
>His analysis of human consciousness and culture vulgarly focuses on individual fitness, while missing the bigger picture. For example, if we applied his mode of analysis to peacocks, we would have to conclude that the lavish feathers of the males also serve no purpose. Of course this is not the case, the feathers ensure that females can select only the strongest males, who can thrive despite their handicap, for mating. Thus an adaptation, that lowers the fitness of individuals, can increase the overall fitness of a species.Absolutely retarded 1st year undergrad patronizing drivel. What incredible arrogance, to bring up literally the most cliche intro textbook example possible. You seriously think he hasn't heard of inclusive fitness? Let me pull the rug from under your feet: that example is an over-simplified toy we give to you babies to waddle in when introducing the concept of inclusive fitness. It's not even neccessarily true that the feathers "ensure that females can select only the strongest male". You belie your ignorance here, because there's literally a plethora of other valid explanations and no uniformly accepted theory. I don't fault you for not knowing this, but I
do fault you for being
so fucking arrogant about it.
>Humans have ridiculously large brains, that take a very long time to fully develop and need a lot of calories. Individual family units of one mother and one father wouldn't be able to raise children on their own in nature, especially because the mother won't be able to contribute during the later stages of her pregnancy and the period after birth. Our species can't reproduce itself without large support networks, but this naturally comes with the massive contradiction of trusting unrelated members of your species to care for your offspring. A less altruistic individual could abuse the support network by accepting as much aid as possible while contributing little or nothing. In the long run these egoists would be more successful at reproducing themselves and cause the collapse of the network.…AND you've got piss poor reading comprehension. I'm surprised you're so confident about your Biology 101 notes, because I doubt you were a very attentive student. You're correctly describing real reproductive challenges faced by humans, as well as many other species.
But none of them have anything to do with consciousness. These are issues that any social organism contends with, including fucking ants and deer. Stop reading this right now, and go type
kin selection into wikipedia. Don't come back until you've read the article top to bottom.
>All of this requires language, symbolic thought and a theory of mind,(Not neccessarily)
>which again requires self-awareness/consciousness.How do you know that? This right here, this is the fucking point of the novel. That's the question Watts invites you to wrestle with: what if self-awareness/consciousness is
not required for those things? Near the end of the novel, one of the antagonists delivers a monologue which I frankly felt Watts was being too brutish and overt by including. I now realize that he must have put it in because a lot of people couldn't read between the lines; he had to literally spell it out. In the world of Blindsight, where it turns out that language/semiotics/theory of mind/etc
doesn't require consciousness, this is what a transhuman super-intellect says to the human protagonist:
< You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo 'sapiens', you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this 'consciousness' you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it's for?< < Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even 'waking' souls are only slaves in denial.< […]< Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.< […]< The system weakens, slows. It takes so much longer now to perceive—to assess the input, mull it over, decide in the manner of cognitive beings. But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best. It sees the danger, hijacks the body, reacts a hundred times faster than that fat old man sitting in the CEO's office upstairs; but every generation it gets harder to work around this— this creaking neurological bureaucracy.< < "I" wastes energy and processing power, self-obsesses to the point of psychosis.< […]< "I" is not the working mind, you see. For Amanda Bates to say "I do not exist" would be nonsense; but when the processes beneath say the same thing, they are merely reporting that the parasites have died. They are only saying that they are free.His entire novel is free on his website
> https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htmThis is the main point I'd like to see debated: is consciousness neccessary for intelligence?
Watts writes a hard sci-fi horror novel that explores the consequences of the answer being "No". On the other hand, it could be that consciousness
really is neccessary for higher-order thinking; the novel argues that we better hope that's the case, by painting the bleak consequences of a negative answer.
As for the birthday analogy:
>This is why the birthday analogy in Blindsight pissed me off. Watts missed the whole point of rituals and culture.No, YOU missed the point. Siri gives that ridiculous analogy in order to be depicted as socially inept and calculating. It also doesn't really have much bearing on the main premise, there's a lot of miscellaneous bits and pieces.
< "You ever show this to anyone?"< "Yeah, my girlfriend"< "You had a girlfriend? How'd she react?"< "She just laughed"< "Better woman than me. I'd have dumped you on the spot"