I recently had the unsettling experience of reading Blindsight by Peter Watts, and the equally unsettling experience of reading The Emotion Machine by Marvin Minsky.  I read Blindsight first, then I went to Boskone where I was on a panel about conciousness and artificial intelligence with Minsky.  We got to talking about what conciousness is, and I brought up Watt's book because it explores the different aspects of conciousness in an entertaining, if somewhat creepy, way.

Minsky shot me down right away, saying that he'd read Watt's book and found it "stupid."  Which it isn't, but I imagine that when you're sitting on a perch as lofty as Minsky's a lot of stuff looks stupid to you.  I read Minsky's book afterwords and I have to say I was a bit surprised by Minsky's reaction.  Blindsight is the closest thing to a novelization of Minsky's non-fiction book as you can get.

Both books argue that conciousness is not a single thing that you can define and bestow on one entity while withhoding it from another.  Conciousness is a set of mental processes that you can bring to bear, or not, as the need arises.  Your brain can think of a solution to a problem, examining many possibilities and discarding those that it "thinks" won't work.  You are often unaware of this as it's happening, but when the problem isn't getting solved in the usual way you might have to resort to thinking about thinking.

That ladder continues on up until you are thinking about your overall goals in life, about what kind of person you want to be, about your priorities and your ethics and your self image and the way other people see you.  There are times in your life when you must move up into this high country, to access the highest level of conciousness.  And then there are times in your life when you just have to get out of the way of a speeding car.  Having access to the high levels at all times would leave you in a world of pain, so it's a good thing we aren't fully concious all the time.

Blindsight breaks down different aspects of conciousness by creating characters that are lacking in some aspect of it.  One character has half a brain and must analzye human interactions as mathematical formulae.  Another has so many gadgets implanted in his brain that he is no longer sure what is part of his body and what isn't.  Another character is a vampire, with no empathy.  He thinks very efficiently, but he's got his own blindspots.

And then there are the aliens.  I can't really describe them without taking away the visceral thrill of discovery.  Suffice it to say that they are not, in our ususal set of definitions, sentient.  But they are smart. 

Blindsight has an extensive bibliography at the back, and a quick scan didn't turn up any Minsky.  I don't doubt that other mind theorists have reached much of the same conclusions that Minsky has, I'm just not that up on the literature.  You might conclude that Watts didn't read any earlier Minsky before writing Blindsight but it sure doesn't show.  Both books led me to the same feeling.

The Emotion Machine made me feel like nothing more than a bag of chemicals, and Blindsight made me feel like nothing more than an inefficient bag of chemicals.  I recommend them both.

UPDATE:  I got an e-mail from Dr. Minsky today (I'm glad I'm not the only one who googles himself on a regular basis) and it sounds like there was a misunderstanding at that panel.  Minsky wasn't talking about Blindsight but some other essay on synaesthesia.  My bad.