Blindsight

And that brings us to the final question, lurking way down in the anoxic zone: the question of what consciousness costs. Compared to nonconscious processing, self-awareness is slow and expensive¹¹². (The premise of a separate, faster entity lurking at the base of our brains to take over in emergencies is based on studies by, among others, Joe LeDoux of New York University^{117, 118}). By way of comparison, consider the complex, lightning-fast calculations of savantes; those abilities are noncognitive¹¹⁹, and there is evidence that they owe their superfunctionality not to any overarching integration of mental processes but due to relative neurological fragmentation⁴. Even if sentient and nonsentient processes were equally efficient, the conscious awareness of visceral stimuli — by its very nature — distracts the individual from other threats and opportunities in its environment. (I was quite proud of myself for that insight. You’ll understand how peeved I was to discover that Wegner had already made a similar point back in 1994¹²⁰.) The cost of high intelligence has even been demonstrated by experiments in which smart fruit flies lose out to dumb ones when competing for food¹²¹, possibly because the metabolic demands of learning and memory leave less energy for foraging. No, I haven’t forgotten that I’ve just spent a whole book arguing that intelligence and sentience are different things. But this is still a relevant experiment, because one thing both attributes do have in common is that they are metabolically expensive. (The difference is, in at least some cases intelligence is worth the price. What’s the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?)

While a number of people have pointed out the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn’t more trouble than it’s worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they’re probably right. I hope they are. Blindsight is a thought experiment, a game of Just suppose and What if. Nothing more.

On the other hand, the dodos and the Steller sea cows could have used exactly the same argument to prove their own superiority, a thousand years ago: if we’re so unfit, why haven’t we gone extinct? Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The biggest boys on the block at any given time aren’t necessarily the fittest, or the most efficient, and the game isn’t over. The game is never over; there’s no finish line this side of heat death. And so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven’t yet lost.

Cunningham’s stats about self-recognition in primates: those too are real. Chimpanzees have a higher brain-to-body ratio than orangutans¹²², yet orangs consistently recognise themselves in mirrors while chimps do so only half the time¹²³. Similarly, those nonhuman species with the most sophisticated language skills are a variety of birds and monkeys — not the presumably “more sentient” great apes who are our closest relatives^{81, 124}. If you squint, facts like these suggest that sentience might almost be a phase, something that orangutans haven’t yet grown out of but which their more-advanced chimpanzee cousins are beginning to. (Gorillas don’t self-recognise in mirrors. Perhaps they’ve already grown out of sentience, or perhaps they never grew into it.)

Of course, Humans don’t fit this pattern. If it even is a pattern. We’re outliers: that’s one of the points I’m making.

I bet vampires would fit it, though. That’s the other one.

Finally, some very timely experimental support for this unpleasant premise came out just as Blindsight was being copy edited: it turns out that the unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than is the conscious mind¹²⁵. 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.”¹²⁶

Miscellaneous Ambience (Background Details, Bad Wiring, and the Human Condition)

The child Siri Keeton was not unique: we’ve been treating certain severe epilepsies by radical hemispherectomy for over fifty years now¹²⁷. Surprisingly, the removal of half a brain doesn’t seem to impact IQ or motor skills all that much (although most of hemispherectomy patients, unlike Keeton, have low IQs to begin with)¹²⁸ . I’m still not entirely sure why they remove the hemisphere; why not just split the corpus callosum, if all you’re trying to do is prevent a feedback loop between halves? Do they scoop out one half to prevent alien hand syndrome — and if so, doesn’t that imply that they’re knowingly destroying a sentient personality?