Blindsight - can intelligence exist without Sentience?

[Broomstick]

You can get the Starfish/Maelstrom/Behemoth trilogy from his website in e-format at no charge to you.

He also has some short stories there as well.

[jollyreaper]

Excellent. Thanks for the tip!

[Broomstick]

I'm actually glad this thread was resurrected... I'm thinking of adding Blindsight to my e-collection.

[Manus Celer Dei]

So basically the idea of these aliens is a variation of the Chinese room thought experiment?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Room

The Chinese Room idea is a central part of Blindsight, including a very startling sequence where the plucky heroes begin to figure out the alien's nature while communicating with them, to which the aliens respond:
Spoiler

"You think we're just a Chinese Room!"

I say this due to Watts' "vampires", which also appear in the book, being genetically engineered intelligences that are just as or more intelligent than humans but arguably less sapient (although not as non-sapient as the Scramblers)

Spoiler

The (super-grim) ending pretty much implies that vampires have mostly freed themselves from the shackles of sapience entirely and it's given them the leg-up to butcher most of humanity.