Blindsight, page 309 by Peter Watts
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fraud"115.
Art might be a bit of an exception. Aesthetics seem to require some level of self-awareness--in fact, the evolution of aethestics might even be what got the whole sentience ball rolling in the first place. When music is so beautiful if makes you shiver, that's the reward circuitry in your limbic system kicking in: the same circuitry that rewards you for fucking an attractive partner or gorging on sucrose116. It's a hack, in other words; your brain has learned how to get the reward without actually earning it through increased fitness98. It feels good, and it fulfills us, and it makes life worth living. But it also turns us inward and distracts us. Those rats back in the sixties, the ones that learned to stimulate their own pleasure centers by pressing a lever: remember them? They pressed those levers with such addictive zeal that they forgot to eat. They starved to death. I've no doubt they died happy, but they died. Without issue. Their fitness went to Zero.
Aesthetics. Sentience. Extinction.
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 University117, 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 di