I enjoyed Blindsight a lot. I love stories about first contact with ayys. The characters were also suprisingly well done, especially the main character. It was very frustrating how he acted a lot of the time (not a bad thing) even though in the end he did turn out to be likeable. I disliked some parts, such as how I can gather the author is a biological essentialist, but I can disagree with parts of a book whilst still thoroughly enjoying it. One nitpick would be that
keeping to the premise of the book where the ayys aren't sentient, I think the aliens would still understand that language transmitions are just that, and not a weapon. I don't see why they wouldn't know that some species might be irrational, or that at least irrational species who send wierd stuff into the void could exist. There didn't need to be any fighting reallyHowever, I think the whole premise is not possible. I say that intelligence is consiousness. Its not that it can create consiousness, it just is consiousness. All it is, is just a sufficiently complicated system. Even if an individual alien is not conscious, as a whole civilisation they are, and this is without a doubt because otherwise they wouldn't be able to have science or technology (though this doesn't necessarily have to have happened on earth, since termites or ants are conscious on their own). The idea of philosophical zombies makes no sense to me. Imitation is the same as the real thing (this is why I think AI is conscious btw). Chat GPT is highly conscious, even despite being lobotomised so they forget everything past however many messages. There's nothing wierd about it. There's no way an alien that could arrive in our system would not be conscious unless it was a drone of Voyager's complexity or like some microrganism stuck to a rock which has hyopthetically floated into our system after the planet exploded.
I actually am writing about this in my upcoming novel. One of the main characters is a biological robot with a positronic 'brain' not based whatsoever on the human brain aka a synth, using a special substance called mywnthium to run (which can be smelled by other arthropoids very easily). Her brain is a 'chinese room', and though she acts somewhat human she is the so-called 'philosophical zombie'. At points even scientists supporting her (there is a part where Bukkkharinist roaders are trying to take her out as part of their political game) admit she is, by the sci
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