PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 253 Blindsight
escape.
I didn't understand the sounds the meat was making, but I heard
a voice from somewhere. It was like God talking, and that I
couldn't help but understand.
"Get out of your room, Keeton," it hissed. "Stop transposing or
interpolating or rotating or whatever it is you do. Just listen. For
once in your goddamned life, understand something. Understand
that your life depends on it. Are you listening, Keeton?"
And I cannot tell you what it said. I can only tell you what I
heard.
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.
Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger.
Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your
body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self
'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body
in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought—
to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant
subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation
for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and
it thinks that one drove the other.
But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even
exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you.
Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation
of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively
human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation.
Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific
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