Blindsight
I am finding it very difficult to pick a single sentence, being as there are so many good ones to choose from. I haven’t even finished the novel yet; I can’t imagine what the next 80 pages contains.
But, going through, I have settled on this:
“Human nature was becoming an assembly-line edit, Humanity itself increasingly relegated from production to product” (163).
This idea evokes a lot of imagery for me. I imagine “humans” on a conveyor belt like toy dolls, having their standard personalities, skills, and physical features installed by machines that don’t even have the intelligence to know what they are creating. And the very notion that human nature could be produced on an assembly line is so alien to me it’s disturbing. This brings up some of the essential questions that Blindsight dabbles in: What does it mean to be human? How do we define our identities?
Born on an assembly line, and put together piece by piece, are we still human? Biologically we may be the same from the inside out, but biology does not account for our nature and our humanity. But what does? Is it our collective memories and our upbringing? Our instincts? Each of these factors combined creates an identity distinctly you. However with technology on the cutting edge in Blindsight, if we are unhappy with these factors, we can go back and edit our nature; change the past. With the option to change the factors that made you innately you, I don;t believe your identity is yours any longer.
What frightens me most however, is the idea that even if we are assembled rather than born, how would we know the difference? Would there be a difference? Theoretically, if our biology is the same and we are pushed out into the world from the production line, couldn’t we develop the same way?
I find I have more questions than answers.
Leave a Reply