It turns out the unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than is the conscious mind114. The conscious mind just can’t handle as many variables, apparently. Quoth one of the researchers: “At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we’re not very good at it.”

Parts of Blindsight can be thought of as a rejoinder to arguments presented in Karl’s novel Permanence; I disagree with his reasoning at almost every step, and am still trying to figure out how we arrived at the same general endpoint.

All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those theories, all those drug dreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for.

The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very

Perfection’s unattainable but it isn’t unapproachable, you know?

Less ambitious, more accessible, Wegner’s The Illusion of Conscious Will20 doesn’t deal with the nature of consciousness so much as with the nature of will, which Wegner thumbnails as “our mind’s way of estimating what it thinks it did.” And of course, Oliver Sacks21 was sending us memos from the edge of consciousness long before consciousness even

Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster. I explored it all. Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Norretranders said it was a

“Perhaps. Depends on the population dynamics, among other things. But I’d guess that at least one thing an automaton lacks is empathy; if you can’t feel, you can’t really relate to something that does, even if you act as though you do. Which makes it interesting to note how many sociopaths show up in the world’s upper echelons, hmm? How

They’d hoped, by now, to have banished sleep forever. The waste was nothing short of obscene: a third of every Human life spent with its strings cut, insensate, the body burning fuel but not producing. Think of all we could accomplish if we didn’t have to lapse into unconsciousness every fifteen hours or so, if our minds could stay awake and alert