PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 264 Blindsight
to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was
good for. None needed: obviously, consciousness makes us what
we are. It lets us see the beauty and the ugliness. It elevates us
into the exalted realm of the spiritual. Oh, a few outsiders—
Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who
barely achieved obscurity—wondered briefly at the why of it: why
not soft computers, and no more? Why should nonsentient systems
be inherently inferior? But they never really raised their voices
above the crowd. The value of what we are was too trivially selfevident
to ever call into serious question.
Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the
angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing
but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more
than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind
those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out
from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I?
Who am I?
What a stupid fucking question. I could have answered it in a
second, if Sarasti hadn't forced me to understand it first.
"Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves."
—Thoreau
The shame had scoured me and left me hollow. I didn't care who
saw me. I didn't care what state they saw me in. For days I'd
floated in my tent, curled into a ball and breathing my own stink
while the others made whatever preparations my tormentor had
laid out for them. Amanda Bates was the only one who'd raised
even a token protest over what Sarasti had done to me. The others
kept their eyes down and their mouths shut and did what he told
them to— whether from fear or indifference I couldn't tell.
It was something else I'd stopped caring about.
Sometime during that span the cast on my arm cracked open like