Echopraxia

In 2014, Peter Watts released Echopraxia, a continuation to his thought-provoking 2006 novel Blindsight. Echopraxia is a sidequel: it takes place largely concurrently with Blindsight. (And apparently Watts wrote a lot of it while surviving a flesh-eating disease on his leg!)

The novel's protagonist is Daniel Brüks, a parasitologist doing solitary research in the Oregon high desert. He's kind of keeping low profile after his previous work was used in an unfortunate way. Dan's only nearby neighbor is a monastery of Bicamerals, transhumanists whose goal is some sort of collective hive mind existence. Older members of the order seem to have already reached it.

Dan hasn't been really interacting with the Bicamerals until vampire Valerie and her zombie soldier minions attack the monastery. Dan gets caught in between and is roped into quite an adventure, soon finding himself aboard a spaceship, the Crown of Thorns.

Dan is augmented far less than what the technology in the book's world would allow. He's practically a baseline human, as they call him. That makes Dan also far less smart than the conjoined-mind Bicamerals are, for instance. Watts is great at keeping superhuman intelligence as mysterious and unpredictable for lowly human-level intelligence.

Dan's involvement in the unfolding events seems happenstance. For the longest time he has no idea where or why they're going. The other, near baseline humans aboard the ship are more or less in the same situation although they do have assigned positions. Eventually, I suppose largely towards the end, it dawns to Dan that maybe he's not there by accident.

Echopraxia continues with the theme of consciousness from Blindsight -- and how could it not with story elements such as it has. However, at the end of the book where Watts lists the again numerous sources and their uses, he says to have taken his shot at the consciousness topic with Blindsight already. Instead, Echopraxia's key theme is free will -- or rather, the complete lack of it.

The novel's title kind of brushes it: echopraxia is the act of involuntarily imitating someone else's actions. The actual condition appears briefly in the book when Dan encounters a couple of augmented people having been infected by an echopraxia causing virus, doomed to mirror each others' movements.

While echopraxia may be bit of an extreme example, the same principle applies to the core functionality of the brain. Neurons react to stimuli: nothing happens if there is none. Once learned about, I find the concept of determinism very easy to believe in. There's no randomness; merely vast complexity built from the simplest pieces -- the strange loops of Douglas Hofstadter.

I don't know if I would go as far as the Bicamerals, though. In the novel, all the advanced-brain people believe in some sort of higher purpose, god as a process -- it's evidently impossible not to when you're on that level. Even the vampires believe -- and they're probably the most intelligent of them all. In some discussion, with novice monk Lianna Lutterodt I believe, it is suggested that science is based on belief as well. How would you know if physics working the way they do is true outside the local area of the universe you're able to examine?

I'm still of the opinion that the vampires in Watts's novels are too a silly thing. I feel their existence may work even against the author when people mention them, attracting new readers with wrong expectations. I enjoyed the imaginative crucifix glitch and how Valerie worked around it -- but at the same time it is so farcical. The existence of a resurrected vampire race hurts the seriousness of the hard scifi.

I saw recently a reddit thread about how google search is terrible now because almost every result is some search-engine-optimized AI-written trash. Someone (who clearly had not read the book) mentioned they've noticed the phenomenon on reddit too with the "space vampire novel" Blindsight being recommended everywhere. Space vampires? I'd expect it to be some campy-ass story based on that description. I also found it amusing that the person trying to correct that impression failed to mention the actual key theme of the novel despite listing many of its elements.

Media Death Cult, a youtube channel I've watched for scifi book recommendations, added to the misconception and put "SPACE VAMPIRE" in the thumbnail of his review video. The same channel did do an interesting 2-hour interview with Watts, though, the initial topic being how we're fucked. Peter Watts is evidently bit of a doomer.

I haven't followed the general doomer discussion but I wonder if it has sparked any ideas for actually surviving the inevitable collapse, whatever its exact cause may be. One particular thought that tickles my brain is if a nation or some other entity for instance decided to abandon half-assed attempts to slow down the biosphere's destruction, and instead started actively working towards the goal of still being there past the end -- by building vaults or whatever -- what would the reaction of others be? Paul Harrell, the firearms youtuber I've mentioned in some older post, has noted how some people get weirdly upset if they notice someone prepare for a bad situation, like by having a bug out bag. As if the preparation invited the actual thing to happen. It would be interesting to see the international intercourse on apocalypse survival.

Watts and the Media Death Cult guy -- I guess he goes by the name Moid -- ended up talking about other stuff too -- not vampires though! One intriguing suggestion Watts presented was that consciousness emerges when the world no longer matches the model brain has built of it. Doing the same drive to work every day allows the action to become subconscious, not requiring active thought to perform. But when something surprising happens, like when an animal jumps on the driveway, consciousness emerges to try to solve the situation.

I got the feeling Watts could have been probed more about it but Moid was so stunned by the whole idea that they switched topics. I would have wanted to hear the author's thoughts for instance on an entity that had the capacity to create a mental model so massive that the it wouldn't be surprised by anything and thus would never have a conscious thought. I suppose that's what Blindsight was about though.

Out of interest I checked out one of the sources Watts had listed at the end of Echopraxia -- mostly because it was a youtube video, not a research paper behind a paywall (which Watts mentioned having been smuggled past on an occasion or two). The video in question was Dr. Robert Sapolsky's lecture about biological underpinnings of religiosity. How the tendency for obsessive compulsive disorder has been passed down countless generations despite it clearly being a harmful mutation, in the worst case completely paralyzing the person, trapping them in meaningless repetition.

After watching that, Youtube started recommending me other Sapolsky stuff, including Skeptic interviewing him, mostly about determinism. Sapolsky believes strongly that the criminal justice system (of USA, I gathered) to be wrong in focusing on punishment. His reasoning is probably best heard from himself but there was an interesting point in the discussion.

Despite things being deterministic, predicting something like a person's behavior is nigh impossible due to the sheer number of things that affect it. However, Sapolsky points out that despite the unpredictability, we can still collect statistics. Isaac Asimov may have indeed been onto something with the psychohistory in his Foundation series.

To yet return to Echopraxia a bit: on my post about Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky I noted how that novel reminded me of Blindsight and wondered if Tchaikovsky had read it. Thus I found it oddly coincidental that when the crew in Echopraxia encountered the alien lifeform, they decided to name it Portia after the same genus of jumping spider that appears in Tchaikovsky's novels. Now I wonder if he had read Echopraxia as well.

Edited 2024-01-06: Fixed some language errors.