Peter Watts

It's the only way the YouTube algorithm really notices me.

Today, we will be discussing The Blind Sight by Peter Watts.

Now, we as humans tend to view evolution in a very self-centralizing way.

We tend to imagine that the most intelligent species will be the most dominant species.

What happens when contact doesn't just invade our airspace but fundamentally rewrites the human body, our consciousness, and our very perception of time?

This is where the genre pushes our biological and psychological boundaries to the absolute breaking point, and the most rigorous, scientifically terrifying test of this is Peter Watts' two thousand six novel, Blindsight.

This book is wild, and I want to spend some real time on it.

A massive array of alien probes burns up in Earth's atmosphere, taking a complete snapshot of our planet.

I'm thinking about what to say next.

I'm fully aware that I am a person sitting in a room right now.

You're telling me Peter Watts created an alien that is highly intelligent but isn't conscious.

How does that even make sense?

Examples include Homo neanderthalensis, Homo erectus, and Homo floresiensis.

Peter Watts, in his novel Blindsight, merely adds an additional species to that list.

They evolved in a different way.

The wrong way.

I did, yeah.

If we are talking about abandoning that human in a rubber mask trope, we really have to start with Peter Watts' 2006 novel, Blindsight.

Okay.

This book is just an absolute masterclass in challenging human exceptionalism.

I have already covered Blindsight in two other videos, which you can find linked in the description.

Like I said earlier, Peter Watts has crafted a very interesting universe here.

It is a world where humans have reawakened an ancient, long-forgotten intelligent predator and essentially enslaved them.

It is a world where a religious group known as the Bicameral Order, through an unknown method involving the rewiring of the temporal lobe and connecting to each other in a hive mind supercomputer, are able to come to fundamental truths about the nature of the universe.

What if consciousness isn't a gift? What if it's actually a flaw?

Which brings us to Peter Watts' 2006 novel, Blindsight.

If you want evolutionary horror, this is the gold standard.

The setup is wild.

How does that even work? How can you have advanced intelligence without a self to direct it?

This is the savage central argument of Blindsight.

Peter Watts has a background in marine mammal biology, and he leans heavily into evolutionary theory.

He argues that consciousness might just be a localized peak on the evolutionary fitness landscape, a temporary parasitic overlay.

That's not kind of normal curriculum for what I do, but I kind of needed a little bit of a breather, and I had a couple people who had reached out to me, and I thought, you know what, I'm going to break my usual rule of not responding to these things, just because there were interesting opportunities.

So this will be the first of two of them, but I'm going to be talking with Peter Watts about his new collection, so I'll hand you over to myself in the past.

Well, I'm very pleased to be joined by Peter Watts to talk about his new short story collection, Fold Catastrophes.

So hi, Peter.

Thanks for joining me.

Yeah, exactly.

So for any of my listeners who don't know you, how about a quick introduction?

My name is Peter Watts.

yet they'd never responded to a single official communication attempt, except to press their attacks harder.

Similar to some concepts in other books I've covered, like Blindsight by Peter Watts, these life forms are suggested not to be conscious at all, Human beings are conscious.

There is something that exists within us that has become more than mere intelligence.

We think, and yet something else perceives those thoughts.