PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 263 Blindsight
given what I'd just endured in front of them all; someone should
have said something. Perhaps Sarasti had ordered them not to
discuss it. I didn't know why. But it was obvious by now that the
vampire had been orchestrating their interactions with me for some
time. Now I was in hiding, but he knew I'd listen in at some point.
Maybe, for some reason, he didn't want my surveillance—
contaminated…
He could have simply locked me out of ConSensus. He hadn't.
Which meant he still wanted me in the loop.
Zombies. Automatons. Fucking sentience.
For once in your goddamned life, understand something.
He'd said that to me. Or something had. During the assault.
Understand that your life depends on it.
Almost as if he were doing me a favor.
Then he'd left me alone. And had evidently told the others to do
the same.
Are you listening, Keeton?
And he hadn't locked me out of ConSensus.
Centuries of navel-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to
Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and
qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark.
Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as
functional cluster.
I explored it all.
Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it
in the singing of caged electrons. Nirretranders said it was a fraud;
Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger
wouldn't even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it
out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Gödel was right
after all: no system can fully understand itself.
Not even the synthesists had been able to rotate it down. The
load-bearing beams just couldn't take the strain.
All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those
theories, all those drugdreams and experiments and models trying
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