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Peter Watts 254 Blindsight
breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious
mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a
deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied
researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else.
It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it.
Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a
performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every
dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body
run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at
destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads
traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether
climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine
for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.
Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother
citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the
unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment
leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your
lessons are all learned consciously Do you think that proves
there's no other way Heuristic software's been learning from
experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars
learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and
design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only
path to learning leads through sentience You're Stone-age
nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying
even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering
was good enough for your parents.
Do you want to know what consciousness is for Do you want
to know the only real purpose it serves Training wheels. You
can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you
focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way
to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one
side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step.
Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way.
And it's fighting back.
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