Blindsight

[vak]

Дочитал "Blindsight" Питера Уоттса. Сильная книжка, однако. Местами напоминает Стругацких. Язык потруднее доступного мне уровня, приходилось напрягаться.

В послесловии Уоттс упоминает философа, который взялся объяснить феномен самосознания. Чувака зовут Томас Метцингер. Надо будет проштудировать на досуге.

This is a book about consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first-person perspective. Its main thesis is that no such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognized as models. The phenomenal self is not a thing, but a process—and the subjective experience of being someone emerges if a conscious information-processing system operates under a transparent self-model. You are such a system right now, as you read these sentences. Because you cannot recognize your self-model as a model, it is transparent: you look right through it. You don’t see it. But you see with it. In other, more metaphorical, words, the central claim of this book is that as you read these lines you constantly confuse yourself with the content of the self-model currently activated by your brain.

This is not your fault. Evolution has made you this way. On the contrary. Arguably, until now, the conscious self-model of human beings is the best invention Mother Nature has made. It is a wonderfully efficient two-way window that allows an organism to conceive of itself as a whole, and thereby to causally interact with its inner and outer environment in an entirely new, integrated, and intelligent manner.