Take a deep breath. Can you feel your lungs filling with air? Now look at your hand. Can you see your five fingers with their articulated joints?
With each of these experiences, you are aware not only of what you experience — you are also aware that you are experiencing it. You are conscious of experience, and that implies you are conscious to begin with. But here is a question for you: What is that consciousness good for? What does it do? Is it even necessary?
These questions are central to the amazing science fiction novel Blindsight by Peter Watts.
The real-world phenomenon of “blindsight” occurs when the visual processing machinery in someone’s brain is destroyed. They can no longer react to visual stimuli. Under certain circumstances, however, their body will still respond appropriately to visual information, as if some lower part of the nervous system were doing the job of seeing.
Using this blindsight as a metaphor, Watts is asking if the self-awareness we associate with consciousness might just be an energy-hogging add-on to brain function that is not necessary for intelligence. In this view, the Self we hold so dear is an evolutionary development that occurred in Earth’s lineage of intelligent creatures — us — but is not needed. Going even further, the book implies that evolution will not continue to select for consciousness in the long run. Our self-aware minds are, as one character implies, a kind of parasite that is riding our body’s nervous system.
