PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 308 Blindsight
generally at ungodly hours. By the same token, Dave is exempted
from the familiar any-errors-are-entirely-mine schtick that we
authors boilerplate onto our Acknowledgements. At least some of
the mistakes contained herein are probably Dave's fault.
Profs. Dan Brooks and Deborah MacLennan, both of the
University of Toronto, provided the intellectual stimulation of an
academic environment without any of the political and bureaucratic
bullshit that usually goes along with it. I am indebted to them for
litres of alcohol and hours of discussion on a number of the issues
presented herein, and for other things that are none of your fucking
business. Also in the too-diverse-to-itemise category, André
Breault provided a west-coast refuge in which I completed the first
draft. Isaac Szpindel—the real one— helped out, as usual, with
various neurophys details, and Susan James (who also really exists,
albeit in a slightly more coherent format) told me how linguists
might approach a First Contact scenario. Lisa Beaton pointed me
to relevant papers in a forlorn attempt to atone for whoring her soul
to Big Pharma. Laurie Channer acted as general sounding board,
and, well, put up with me. For a while, anyway. Thanks also to
Karl Schroeder, with whom I batted around a number of ideas in
the arena of sentience-vs.-intelligence. Parts of Blindsight can be
thought of as a rejoinder to arguments presented in Karl's novel
Permanence; I disagree with his reasoning at almost every step,
and am still trying to figure out how we arrived at the same general
endpoint.