PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 160 Blindsight
Agnosias. Hemineglect. ConSensus served up a freak show to
make any mind reel at its own fragility: a woman dying of thirst
within easy reach of water, not because she couldn't see the faucet
but because she couldn't recognize it. A man for whom the left
side of the universe did not exist, who could neither perceive nor
conceive of the left side of his body, of a room, of a line of text. A
man for whom the very concept of leftness had become literally
unthinkable.
Sometimes we could conceive of things and still not see them,
although they stood right before us. Skyscrapers appeared out of
thin air, the person talking to us changed into someone else during
a momentary distraction— and we didn't notice. It wasn't magic.
It was barely even misdirection. They called it inattentional
blindness, and it had been well-known for a century or more: a
tendency for the eye to simply not notice things that evolutionary
experience classed as unlikely.
I found the opposite of Szpindel's blindsight, a malady not in
which the sighted believe they are blind but one in which the blind
insist they can see. The very idea was absurd unto insanity and yet
there they were, retinas detached, optic nerves burned away, any
possibility of vision denied by the laws of physics: bumping into
walls, tripping over furniture, inventing endless ludicrous
explanations for their clumsiness. The lights, unexpectedly turned
off by some other party. A colorful bird glimpsed through the
window, distracting attention from the obstacle ahead. I can see
perfectly well, thank you. Nothing wrong with my eyes.
Gauges in the head, Szpindel had called them. But there were
other things in there too. There was a model of the world, and we
didn't look outward at all; our conscious selves saw only the
simulation in our heads, an interpretation of reality, endlessly
refreshed by input from the senses. What happens when those
senses go dark, but the model—thrown off-kilter by some trauma
or tumor—fails to refresh? How long do we stare in at that
obsolete rendering, recycling and massaging the same old data in a
desperate, subconscious act of utterly honest denial? How long
before it dawns on us that the world we see no longer reflects the
world we inhabit, that we are blind?