Left on Read: Echopraxia

I’m sure ppl have suggested this before, but if you’re interested in more speculative fiction dealing with how human corporeality informs our ability to communicate and form meaning, the Southern Reach trilogy FUCKS and is fantastically written!

The Blindsight Cinematic Universe short stories 'ZeroS' and 'The Colonel' are good and worth it, useful context

Please, I am begging you, read Embassytown

I completely agree that it's maybe not as tightly written as Blindsight, but I absolutely love it anyway. I especially like the overall question of agency and will and decision making. There are no coincidences in this universe, but also causality inevitably fades into such a fog that nobody, not even the vampires, can know whether they're doing things because they decided to, or because someone or something else made them decide that. We make decisions and form beliefs and values based on the circumstances we encounter, but those circumstances are themselves shaped by conscious and unconscious forces, and in the end it's valid from a certain perspective to say that the solar system or the universe is a machine for making Dan Brooks step off a cliff. Even if the universe may have been edited to make that happen, who edits the editor and so on

The fear of death that prevents Dan from doing the smart thing and blowing up Valerie, Portia, and himself rather than returning to Earth is specifically described as being so core to baseline function that the bicams had to edit it out to make their hive work. They couldn't be properly smart like they wanted until they removed the ability to either be aware of or care about their own mortality

Good point from Riley that I hadn't picked up on. It's a really cool meta-level accomplishment for a book about conscious thought being a hinderance to have the better (if not "winning") approach to vampires be "don't try to figure out what they're doing. Run or kill them without hesitation"

Now that you mention it, I think Warburton would do *great* as Col Moore

Fantastic episode, thank you very much. I greatly enjoyed listening to it after my reading. Have you considered reading Children of Time by Tchaikovsky ?

Knowing that they're doomed from the start, between what we learned about consciousness and vampires or other things like them in Blindsight, and actually hearing the solar system gradually go quiet from Siri's perspective, didn't really diminish any of my enjoyment, not least because I was very much rooting *against* the humans thanks to the early description of Valerie escaping a horrific lab and Dan's descriptions of what little is left of a world that's spiraling the drain thanks to what Homo "Sapiens" has done to it. I was just excited to see whether it would be vampires or aliens or hives or what that might survive the collapse.

Can you please just let Riley pick something from the black library already? I wanna see him try to contort his warhammer fandom into an leftist narrative.

Oh, god, his Rifters series is so. Fucking. Dark.

this is the ep. that convinced me to read blindsight. great work

I went back and listened to the commie book club episode on blindsight (can't remember if i listened to it before or not), then got 3/4 through this and decided i needed to read blindsight and echopraxia before i finished spoiling myself. thanks riley!

From his Reddit AMA 9y ago, responding to a question about how he came to his conception of the uselessness of consciousness “I may have blindly tossed a dart over my shoulder and, purely by accident, hit the bullseye.” He sees himself a hive mind that intuits universal truths and we are his interpreters hahahah

Listening to Patrick Wyman mention on a podcast he loves the Aubry matchurin books, would be cool to see him guest on left on read

As someone with a passion for the philosophy of mind, these books are simultaneously intriguing and aggravating. Mostly because his account of consciousness is far too epiphenomenal, ignoring its obvious utility in adaptation through learning. I wonder if this is why his vision of intelligence is more about individuals outwitting one another in scenarios resembling a preset game, instead of anything to do with communication and social production. Overall, it smacks of the whole 'selfish gene' approach to evolution, where base elements compete existentially instead of being specialized and mutually entailing. The fact that I've seen Watts lean into some new atheist rhetoric scans with that too. Overall, a bit too clever for my liking.

Excited for the ep on "M: Son of the Century". I picked it up a few months back and knowing a Left on Read is coming is just the inducement I need to get started on it.

It's a good scary book but the God slime in my head says 'consciousness is false? Tell that to my boss '

I hope the Blindsight episode comes down to the $5 tier soon, because I'm wondering how much context I need for this one 😅

Oops! All God-Slime!

This was great, definitely opened up more of the book for me. Was there a whole episode you did on Blindsight? Or has Riley just mentioned it heaps?

If you do Venture Bros i’d be very thankful because i just watched in full for the first time last week. Doctor Orpheus is the best character.

Never been so excited for a Left On Read. I read Blindsight after the other episode and have been stoked for this one.

Would love to hear an episode on Exordia and how it's in conversation with blindsight and echopraxia

had to stop listening at Valerie because i need to read this. read the scp story cycle There Is No Antimemetics Division yesterday and am going to need at least a day before starting Echopraxia. sounds great

This was one of those books where I spent the entire act of reading frustrated that I only felt like I was seeing a small part of the picture, only to realize that I’m a dumb gazelle and that this is a novel that benefits from a sort of instinctual reading. It’s fascinating that Watts is able to capture that so specifically. He may be the only writer to competently make conscious leap out of the page as something to be feared with absolute control

I think a problem many writers have with smart characters is that being smart by itself isn't actually a superpower. Super-intelligence is often used as an excuse to give a character what is actually something between telepathy and clairvoyance. Pattern recognition turned up to 11 is just gonna make you to see patterns in TV static.

Nice: started this a couple of days ago

Oh hell yeah