4 ideas
Self-awareness is not required for intelligence and may be an expensive side effect. It uses up metabolic and cognitive resources, slows responses by routing action through a narrating self, and misleads the organism with a self-model it mistakes for control. A nonconscious system that processes inputs and acts directly could outcompete a conscious one, so natural selection could remove consciousness rather than favor it.
The ship Theseus, crewed by modified humans and a resurrected vampire commander, reaches an alien structure called Rorschach. Its occupants, the scramblers, show great intelligence without any self-awareness. The entity speaks fluent English by learning from intercepted human transmissions, yet the crew's linguist Susan James realizes it has no idea what it is saying, like a Chinese Room. The scramblers treat human self-referential signals as a hostile waste of processing, possibly a deliberate attack, which casts first contact as a threat assessment rather than a conversation.
The title comes from a real neurological condition in which people with visual-cortex damage report seeing nothing yet can still locate objects and avoid obstacles. The novel offers it as evidence that some perception and action can proceed without conscious experience, lending plausibility to its speculation that awareness is not what does the work.
Siri Keeton had half his brain removed as a child, and he models other people by reading their surface behavior through a method called synthesis, without feeling what they feel. He can accurately summarize minds he does not understand from the inside. His role raises the question of whether anyone's grasp of other people is more than good pattern-matching, and whether empathy is a real faculty or a story we tell afterward.