Peter Watts (rifters)

Who knows what it really 'means'. (And meaning, at least as represented by posters here, seems to vary a fair bit based on oxen ownership.) It seems to indicate that both concepts are more fluid than feels comfortable. To some extent, it feels related to bandwidth/latency/maybe the direct linkage and chemical interaction between brains - as that increases, the boundaries become blurrier. Peter Watts had great fun with this idea in Echopraxia (http://www.rifters.com/ ).

I need to give this a re-read. I really enjoyed my Blindsight re-read recently. But Starfish and Maelstrom after it are such uhh, not to pun to hard but, such high pressure intense sci-fi stories. Amazing ambiance, creeping horror, in such incredible backdrops. Watts just kept going with his universe. It was and is so good. Such an incredible reflection of the world at the time of writing, and I've found it's lost so little of it's capturance. That it gets so many of the plights of the over-civilized world, and the perils lurking in the economic and governmental an attention systems of the planet. From the old site (https://www.rifters.com/attic.htm) to the new site (https://www.rifters.com/), Watts just really, across mediums, wanted to get his world out, to show it's timelines. Incredible. Starfish is where it all started, and I remember it as both a slow burn, but also so hard core, so real. In a world both so our own but so far away, so separated (insert follow up deep joke here), but still within the world, still immersed (pun!) in the Earth of the story. Maelstrom, the second book, is also incredible, in very different ways. Watts reflected on Maelstrom 18 months ago, and it captures some of the amazing titular sceneage, of an overrun net, a howling wasteland from accelerated technological adversarialism. Incredible book. He goes to talk more to his own background, biology, but upon re-reading it, I think of LLMs, of the GPU milleniums burned recently, doing not that…

His Sunflowers series is great too. Maybe my favorite (after Blindsight, of course). Read for free on his webite: https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_TheIsland.pdf Or collected in The Freeze-Frame Revolution here: https://www.amazon.com/Freeze-Frame-Revolution-Peter-Watts-ebook/dp/B0…

I enjoyed reading Peter Watts' "The Freeze-Frame Revolution" (and the accompanying online short stories "Hotshot"[1] and "The Island"[2]) about a sublight interstellar ship and its crew - in that example, they have cryogenic storage that allows the same crew that left Earth to live in short spurts and then sleep for eons, but the struggle with disillusionment with the mission is central to the plot. It also features something like "state propaganda" in the form of the ship's AI which is also programmed to carry out the mission, but it needs the help of the crew. I won't spoil more, but it's one of my favorites! [1]: http://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Hotshot.pdf [2]: https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_TheIsland.pdf

> homo-vampirus https://www.rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm The book is great “what if?” in several directions at once including human vampires.

Watts is an excellent hard scifi author & a lot of his older writing -- including many short stories, the Rifters trilogy (Starfish/Maelstrom/Behemoth) and the excellent novel Blindsight are available to read here: https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm Peter Watts has been interviewed on the science fiction podcast "tales from the bridge" a few times -- IIRC on this episode with Peter Watts & Richard K Morgan (author of Altered Carbon), both authors discussed writing for video games. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-chat-with-peter-watts-richard-…

SF author (and marine biologist) Peter Watts as a great little overview of Portia's "thought process" along with links to some more in-depth articles: https://rifters.com/real/2009/01/iterating-towards-bethlehem.html

I love hard sci-fi and I keep going back to Blindsight: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm Making a distinction between intelligence and consciousness was interesting and I think applies to current AI systems, at least that what came to mind when seeing ChatGPT for the first time. Also vampires being real apex predators brought back from extinction with a decent explanation as to why they don't like crosses is just entertaining to me.

Thank you so much for creating this! I have been wanting something like this forever. Please consider the potential for this - I think you could make something really fun and something people would be willing to pay for. But the problem is you need a world someone else created (or one you painstakingly create yourself). You could consider Conan's Hyborian Age, H.P. Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes, or Peter Watt's work[0] for a known world that is public domain to base your project on. Best of luck! [0]: https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm

> The story follows a crew of astronauts sent to investigate a trans-Neptunian comet that has been found to be transmitting an unidentified radio signal, followed by their subsequent first contact. The novel explores themes of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, and game theory as well as evolution and biology. > Blindsight is available online under a Creative Commons license. Here's the novel: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm (HTML) https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Blindsight.pdf (PDF) http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Blindsight-v1.01-formatt… (ePUB)

I enjoyed Peter Watts' provocative review of Arrival, which I thought I'd shared on HN in the past, but search suggests apparently not: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=7021 In terms of quality I want to rate it above the other two movies we're talking about, and right up there with, ahem, the original Blade Runner as a classic science fiction film. (for me that's saying something, since I dislike the visual style of Villeneuve's films) edit: my main problem with the bomber subplot was just how heavy handed it was

You might want to read his blog [0] to get more insight into his character. I got the impression that the author is a great and likeable human being that became rather cynical due to his disillusionment with humanity. [0]: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/

Don't forget the short story The Colonel which could be considered a prequel to Echopraxia. http://www.tor.com/2014/07/29/the-colonel-peter-watts The things unoffical sidequel to The Thing is also very good. http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ He publishes lots (all?) of his books for free using the Creative Commons licence. I pirate most of my shit tbh but after reading two of his trilogies and finding them some of the best books I have read I had to donate: https://rifters.com/real/donation.htm PD: Minion in the donate page kinda looks like a Petter Watts vampire but im sure he was a bless to have around.

The author explains the vampires in another document [0]. The vampires were my favorite part of the book. [0] https://rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf

I often pick up a book recommendation or other recommendation from here. I read Blindsight by Peter Watts after a comment recently, and it has really stuck with me. It's a sci-fi book about contact with an interstellar intelligence. It's free online. https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm For me the real gems are usually just on-topic comment threads for topics I want to read about. It's incredible when a domain expert shows up to give us the nitty gritty, and it happens--all the time. There's also always this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

Was going to recommend the same, it's a fairly quick read also. Watts has a version hosted on his site as well in various formats. I enjoyed the Notes and References section a lot also. https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

It's also free to read online: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm This is definitely a book that stuck with me over the years. The concepts were very foreign and unusual at the time I read it, and I still find them novel to think about. Definitely in my top five recommendations for sci-fi reading.

I couldn't tell whether you were joking about pirating it, but for others who might be interested, the author has made it available for free download from his website [1]. I love Blindsight as well, and I think I like the other book in the series, Echopraxia (not available for free download though) even more. Both books contain lengthy bibliographies citing various scientific papers the author has drawn ideas from, and on my first readings of both books I ended up spending as much time chasing down interesting references and reading them as I did reading the original books. [1] https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Blindsight is one of my all time favorite books. Looks like it's still available for free from the author's website [0] [0] https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Be sure to check out the "Vampire Domestication" multimedia presentation on that page, for some background on the "vampires" in the series. Thank you, that was a fantastic read, really fills in the universe that Blindsight was set it. Here's a direct link to the PDF: https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf

It's worth mentioning that Blindsight is available online for free: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

A classic post by Peter Watts: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116 "What scared me was the fact that this virtually brain-free patient had an IQ of 126."

Can't recommend Watts enough - Blindsight is one of my top 3 favorite novels. He periodically drops hints about his progress on the sequel to Echopraxia. For quick recommendations, I'd single out two of his short stories (which are two of my favorite stories in general): The 21 Second God - https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=5968 Malak - https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Malak.pdf Edit: I always forget HN doesn't use markdown.

If you like this, you should really pick up Peter Watts' books. He is the author of the post, the owner of rifters.com and one of the best hard SF authors out there. I can't recommend him enough. Also, importantly, he published part of his work, including full books, for free in multiple electronic formats, here [0]. Refs: [0]: https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm

In addition to all the other recommendations, I recommend Blindsight. You can buy it where all good books are sold, or the author also gives it away on his website (https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm) but considers it good form to send a donation his way if you enjoy it. Some fans of the book put together a short teaser trailer for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkR2hnXR0SM

> The awake state only appeared as a survival strategy, to better adapt to the natural environment. Well. Given that "awake" creatures react to stimuli, that might not be too far off the truth. If we could passively survive and not have to forage or hunt for food, what's the point of 'waking up'? Sleeping is advantageous (less energy use). Efficiency is usually selected for, unless there's some other kind of environmental pressure. Maybe that's why we haven't found other civilizations. They are all 'sleeping'. Maybe consciousness is also unnecessary (on that front, I love https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)

I'm posting to second the recommendation for the novel. It is the most interesting exploration of the Mind's I (not a typo) that I've come across in modern sci-fi. It can be read in its entirety at the author's site: https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

It was my first though as well. Idea of aliens, which can just "skip" the sight of humans is pretty cool. The same goes with concept of consciousness as a parasitic/optional part of inteligent species. Blindsight is one of the best, 10/10 on Mohs Scale of sci-fi hardness. I love the description of scientific concepts behind sci-fi story at the end. Such a shame, there is so little books with that kind of deep research. One of the best written, first contact novels out there. I have the luck of hearing Watts lecture on one of the Cons. He is even better in person. If you are from Canada, it is good idea to check, where he is speaking. Authors blog, filled with pop-scientific concepts and ideas [1], is well worth it. [1] https://www.rifters.com/crawl/

There doesn't seem to be much to the god helmet, besides the placebo effect, but at least it inspired this great short story by Peter Watts: https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Heathens.pdf

You're not the first to consider this possibility, as you know. The novelist Peter Watts, in Blindsight, has a remarkably interesting, if also remarkably dark, take on the same idea. I won't spoil it here, since the book is an enjoyable read and freely available from the author's site: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm ("Philosophical zombie" would be a more precise term than "robot", btw, and might make soi-disant rationalists take you slightly more seriously because it's closer to the sort of language they like to use. I don't know why that would be a desideratum for anyone, but if it is for you, this may be worth considering.)