Two Faces of Blindness

Where did alien desire come from? In Part 1 we faced it, but never asked after its origin. Before asking, one thing must be known — the machine that forged alien cognition and the machine that forged our own are, surprisingly, two faces of the same blindness.

Both machines are blind. One is called gradient descent, the other natural selection. Both unable to see ahead — yet how did they produce something so precise? The secret lies in the fact that their blindnesses face in different directions.

Imagine gradient descent — a blind sculptor. His hands rest everywhere on the clay at once. He cannot see the destination. He feels only the slope beneath his fingertips, which way is steepest right here. And following that slope alone, he pushes the entire mass of clay at once, leaving no part untouched. He directly tunes every part that constitutes one vast intelligence — simultaneously, across the whole field. Blindness, yes, but direct and total blindness.

Natural selection is different. He is no sculptor but a reviser of blueprints. He cannot touch the building — only the blueprint. He changes a single letter, then waits for a generation to pass while that blueprint grows into a living thing. And only when the next winter comes does he see whether the building still stands. If not, he revises the next draft. He never touches the vast brain directly — he adjusts only small genes, which in turn serve as the blueprint for a vast brain. Blindness, again, but indirect and generation-delayed blindness.

The same blindness, two faces. One carves the whole at once; the other only rewrites the blueprint and lets the whole be rebuilt. Where one intelligence is tuned directly — there lives alien cognition. Where a blueprint is tuned, blooming into a vast brain — there we live. The alien and the human gaze at each other from opposite ends of blindness.

And here Part 1's question returns. Is alien desire real? Now the answer comes into view — the question itself is wrong. If the machine that forged alien cognition is blind, then the machine that forged our cognition is blind too. Neither made intelligence because it "wanted" to. Desire is what blindness produced, not what produced blindness. If alien cognition is desire without a desirer, then ours is the same — only the direction of the blindness differs.

The two faces of blindness do not stop here. These machines forged not only intelligence, but the very texture of the world we inhabit. What that texture looks like is revealed in the next piece — smooth, errorless, and therefore more cruel.