Blindsight is based on an awful lot of science, but also on philosophy - see the appendix, which had to be shortened for the print editions.
<PERSON>, the author, wrote in a Q&A sesssion:
Have you kept up much with academic philosophy of mind since publishing Blindsight? Have your views on the "hard problem" changed at all in that time?
Hell, I was barely keeping up with that while I was writing it. Even now, I've only read a handful of paper by <PERSON>, for example.
I've kept track as best I'm able, given that I'm an outsider to the field and can't afford the time to do anything more than keep my toes damp. I was intrigued by <PERSON>'s paper which concluded that consciousness itself was a side-effect of no adaptive value; elsewhere here I've mentioned <PERSON>'s PRISM model, which also came out subsequently and which posits a functional origin for consciousness. I've kept a small list of studies showing that cognition seems to work better when consciousness isn't involved. Hell, you've seen the footnotes in Echopraxia.
The hard problem hasn't gone away. No matter what purpose anyone posits for consciousness, whenever I ask the litmus question "Yeah, but is it possible for a nonconscious agent to perform the same role?", the answer continues to be yes. And I don't think anyone has even come close to explaining how certain types of computation, running in certain kinds of meat in certain ways, can wake up. There is nothing in the physics or the neurology or the chemistry that would lead one to expect the emergence of self-awareness. 460
I mean, sure, you've got you neural correlates and your global workspace models. We know that consciousn requires a cross-brain latency of <400 msec, we know what structures are involved, we know the pieces. We know that those pieces, arranged just so, wake up; but we're no closer to understanding why that should be. (<PERSON> makesa good case that we never will, if outer-layer transparency is an essential part of the process.)
I know that lot of people consider <PERSON>'s ideas on consciousness to be kind of flakey, but he may be on to something when he says that the only hope we have of understanding consciousness is to reinvent physics. Because the physics we have isn't getting us anywhere.
and:
What problem do you think "consciousness" solved that can be "side-stepped" by a more intelligent entity?
I like <PERSON>'s PRISM model, which suggests that consciousness evolved as a means of reconciling conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles; but even he admits that it's perfectly possible to imagine a nonconscious agent doing the same thing.
Personally, I think that the metaphor of the elephant and the rider (see <PERSON> answer) is flawed.
As we learn, we commit more and more tasks to unconscious processes. E.g., we have learned to drive a car for hours and do completely unrelated things in our conscious mind in the meantime. We might not even remember much about the way, until something unexpected happens that requires our conscious attention.
At least in humans, consciousness is necessary to handle new things, to discover, to learn, and to decide what to learn.
To advance a civilisation, individuals must be free to follow their own interests and work on new ideas and technologies. Some intelligence might be encoded in process and structure (like a Chinese Room), but that tends to be inflexible, not creative. 693