PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 255 Blindsight
Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its
own agendas. Brains—cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote
stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm
and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms
used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once
had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from
pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion
dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the
organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It
consumes ever-more computational resources, bogs itself down
with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the
parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and
proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom
like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.
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. Scramblers have no need of it, scramblers are more
parsimonious. With simpler biochemistries, with smaller brains—
deprived of tools, of their ship, even of parts of their own
metabolism—they think rings around you. They hide their
language in plain sight, even when you know what they're saying.
They turn your own cognition against itself. They travel between
the stars. This is what intelligence can do, unhampered by selfawareness.
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
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