I’m not sure what to think of this one. Watts rattles off a ton of counterintuitive facts about human cognition, and they’re facts that I love and am fascinated by — this is what I spent my college years studying — but I can’t help but be irritated by his recitation of them.
A big part of this is his prose, which is pretentious and baroque. Three uses of “calcareous” in a single novel might not *sound* like a lot…
The mechanics of what’s going on are often difficult to track. This isn’t so much because of the alienness of the ideas on offer, like in Quantum Thief. It’s more that the language obscures what’s going on. It’s quite a contrast from Rendezvous with Rama, another first-contact-with-a-questionably-populated-alien-craft story. The action is overwritten, and hard to track.
Watts also gives himself too much credit for the quality of the ideas he’s offering. The motley crew of savants that he offers seem not-that-abnormal, to be honest. The idea that a mediating “jargonaut” is necessary to translate their bizarre utterances into baseline-human comprehensible intelligence seems implausible (even with some minor hand-waving about this being an edited account). His characterizations are fairly thin, too — in light of this, giving one character multiple personalities seems like a particularly poor decision.
The biggest problem may be how overeager he is to get to his ideas. There’s a distinct refusal to self-edit — the closing notes of the book mention that his other sci-fi series, Rifters is available in unabridged form on his website, and indicates some kind of disagreement with the publisher about the shorter form the printed edition took. Hmm. One can’t help but wonder if the ideas about the singularity, empathy, Searle’s Chinese Room, qualia zombies, evolution and vampires (sigh) should have been pared down, at least slightly (at the very least the vampires should have been tossed).
Still, I have to admit that the book picks up in its final third. Watts proves to have been building toward something, and it’s coherent and interesting. I’m not a huge fan of the consciousness-denying hypotheses that I associate with Dan Dennett and that Watts attributes to Thomas Metzinger. But they’re presented mostly coherently (though consciousness is given seriously short shrift by Watts, particularly its likely role in organizing concepts so as to make technology possible). I’m more of a mystic, or at least sufficiently guilt-riddled as to want to embrace panpsychism. But I will admit that he’s making an interesting argument, even if it is cobbled together from a truly wild hodge-podge of quite-tentative research and misstatements about electromagnetism.
A ton of people that I know love this book, and a ton more are intrigued by these philosophical questions. If you’re less bugged by the writing than I am, you might really like it. For me it was just okay, though it earns points for its ambition.
