Peter Watts - "Echopraxia (Firefall)"

Prequel to "Blindsight".  Pretty good although I struggle even more actually understanding what's happening. Sometimes the language gets so obscure, so deep-yet-vaguely technical that it's hard to understand. Still a good read.

    "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams"
            William Shakespeare

The Semmelweis reflex or "Semmelweis effect" is a metaphor for the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigms.

The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision.

Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.

Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger, and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, he thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations-and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren't any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty-first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now, we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.

"Rakshi and her kind, they're wise to the old school. You leak footage showing the slants skewering babies and it'll take them maybe thirty seconds to find a pixel that doesn't belong. Discredit the whole campaign. People put a lot less effort into picking apart evidence that confirms what they already believe. The great thing about making yourself the villain is nobody's likely to contradict you."

    "I have never for one instant seen clearly within myself. How then would you have me judge the deeds of others?"
        Maurice Maeterlinck

Imagine you're Siri Keeton, he remembered. And gleaned from a later excerpt of the same signal: Imagine you're a machine.
    "It's a literary affectation. He's trying to be poetic. Putting yourself in the character's head, that kind of thing."

Peter Watts - "Blindsight"

amazing hard sci-fi exploring whether sentience is actually worth it, via a First Contact situation with a ship called Rorschach.

"memories aren't historical archives. They're-improvisations, really. A lot of the stuff you associate with a particular event might be factually wrong, no matter how clearly you remember it. The brain has a funny habit of building composites. Inserting details after the fact. But that's not to say your memories aren't true, okay? They're an honest reflection of how you saw the world, and every one of them went into shaping how you see it. But they're not photographs. More like impressionist paintings."

"I deal with other people's information. I don't vomit my own personal life into the public sphere."

"I'm saying these things can see your nerves firing from across the room, and integrate that into a crypsis strategy, and then send motor commands to act on that strategy, and then send other commands to stop the motion before your eyes come back online."

The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message, only after wasting time and effort does the deception become apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.
    Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.
    The signal is an attack.

"One hundred thirteen facial dimensions, each presenting a different variable. Principle-component combinations present as multi-feature aspect ratios." He turned to face me, his naked gleaming eyes just slightly side-cast. "You'd be surprised how much gray matter is dedicated to the analysis of facial imagery. Shame to waste it on anything as ... counterintuitive as residual plots or contingency tables."
    I felt my jaw clencing. "And the expressions? What do they represent?"
    "Software customizes output for user."
    An agonizing gallery pled for mercy on all sides.
    "I am wired for hunting," he reminded gently.

Chimpanzees have a higher brain-to-body ratio than orangutans, yet orangs consistently recognize themselves in mirrors while chimps do so only half the time. Gorillas don't self-recognize at all. Similarly, those nonhuman species with the most sophisticated language skills are a variety of birds and monkeys - not the presumably "more sentient" great apes who are our closest relatives. Such facts almost suggest that sentience itself could be a phase, something that orangutans haven't yet grown out of but which their more advanced chimpanzee cousins are beginning to.