Blindsight

The Consciousness-as-Liability Argument

The central provocation of Blindsight is stated plainly and then demonstrated across 384 pages: consciousness may not be an evolutionary advantage. The alien presence the crew encounters — vast, complex, and capable of behavior that requires extraordinary processing power — shows no evidence of being aware. It is intelligent without being conscious, purposeful without being a subject of experience.

Watts grounds this not in speculation but in actual scientific literature. Research on split-brain patients, blindsight (the neurological phenomenon that names the novel), and unconscious motor processing all point toward the same uncomfortable finding: a great deal of sophisticated cognition happens without awareness. Awareness may even slow things down. A batter who consciously thinks about a swing will miss; a hitter acting on trained reflex will connect. Watts extrapolates this across evolutionary time and asks what it would mean if the universe were full of intelligence that never developed the expensive, looping overhead of self-awareness.

The answer the novel arrives at is not comforting.

Siri Keeton and the Unreliable Observer

The narrator of Blindsight is Siri Keeton, who had half his brain surgically removed as a child to cure epilepsy. The surgery worked. It also left him without the normal architecture of emotional processing and self-reflection — Siri functions as a synthesist, someone trained to observe the behavior of others and translate it for audiences who cannot understand specialists. He is, professionally and neurologically, a relay rather than a participant.

This is formally extraordinary. A novel about whether consciousness is meaningful is narrated by someone whose consciousness is compromised, who cannot fully experience the events he describes, who reconstructs what happened from observation and inference rather than from felt experience. Siri is not an unreliable narrator in the conventional sense — he is not lying, not self-deceived, not emotionally distorted. He is unreliable because the machinery that generates subjective experience in most people is simply not fully present in him.

The effect is pervasive. Siri’s narration is precise and intelligent and yet consistently at a remove from the events he describes, which means the reader is always receiving the novel through a filter that raises the very questions the novel is exploring. Whether Siri’s experience of the mission is less real than a different narrator’s would have been is a question Watts leaves open, and deliberately so.

The Alien Design

Most science fiction aliens are, at bottom, people. They have motivations, they communicate, they can be negotiated with or fought. Even the most alien-seeming often resolve, on contact, into something with recognizable structure. Watts makes a different choice.

The alien entity in Blindsight — the Rorschach, the scramblers — is not designed to be understood. Its behavior is complex, responsive, and purposeful, but purposeful in the way a very sophisticated defense system is purposeful, without any implication that there is something it is like to be this thing. The scramblers are capable of learning to fake human behavior well enough to pass certain tests. They cannot pass tests that require genuine awareness of their own deception — not because they are unintelligent, but because there is, plausibly, no one home.

This deliberate design choice is the novel’s most radical formal decision. Watts refuses to give the reader an alien encounter that resolves into contact, communication, or understanding. The aliens remain genuinely, structurally other — and the horror of the novel is not that they are hostile but that hostility implies interiority they may not have.

The Vampire Element

Blindsight includes vampires. This requires some accounting for.

Watts provides it. The novel’s vampires are not supernatural but evolutionary — a subspecies of hominid that preyed on humans and went extinct due to a genetic flaw: exposure to right angles triggers fatal seizures. Right angles are vanishingly rare in nature but ubiquitous in human built environments, which is why vampires could not survive in a world of architecture. In the novel, they have been revived through genetic reconstruction and deployed as cognitive tools — their processing speed and pattern-recognition capabilities exceed normal human cognition significantly, which makes them useful crew members for exactly the kind of mission that requires rapid threat assessment and non-human decision-making.

The detail of the cross-shaped trigger is Watts at his most playful and most rigorous simultaneously. He takes a piece of folklore, finds the mechanistic explanation that would make it real, and integrates it into the novel’s larger argument: that cognitive architecture shapes the nature of consciousness, and that different architectures produce not just different abilities but different relationships to awareness itself. The vampire Jukka Sarasti is the most capable entity on the ship and arguably the least conscious of the human-or-human-derived crew. That is not a coincidence.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — The most rigorous philosophical argument in contemporary hard science fiction, built into a first-contact narrative that refuses every comforting assumption about what intelligence, consciousness, and alien life might mean.

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