Top 100 Peter Watts Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “There was no shortage of perspectives. The noosphere seethed with scenarios ranging from utopian to apocalyptic.”

— Peter Watts

52. “Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing – irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default.”

— Peter Watts

53. “But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best.”

— Peter Watts

54. “They know God exists already that’s old. I think now they’re trying to figure what to do with It.” “What to do with God.” “Maybe worship. Maybe disinfect.”

— Peter Watts

55. “God is a sadist on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, and His name is Physics.”

— Peter Watts

56. “Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.”

— Peter Watts

57. “The difference between Science and Faith, therefore, is no more and no less than predictive power. Scientific insights have proven to be better predictors than Spiritual ones, at least in worldly matters; they prevail not because they are true, but simply because they work.”

— Peter Watts

58. “But deceleration is for pansies. We’re headed for the stars.”

— Peter Watts

59. “Brain’s got all kinds of gauges. You can know you’re blind even when you’re not; you can know you can see, even when you’re blind. And yeah, you can know you don’t exist even when you do. It’s a long list, commissar. Cotard’s, Anton’s, Damascus disease. Just for starters.”

— Peter Watts

60. “She spun a hundred-eighty degrees at the end of the passageway, landed like an acrobat beside the drum hatch. “The reason. Why something would attack us even if we didn’t have anything it wanted.” I read it off her: “If it wasn’t attacking at all. If it was defending itself.”

— Peter Watts

61. “Don’t feel too bad. Everyone’s in chains here. Eriophora’s a slave ship. We cavemen are shackled by our need for air and food and water, by the disorienting discontinuity of lives cut into slices spread centuries apart. The Chimp is shackled by its own stupidity, And you, well...”

— Peter Watts

62. “I was trying to get a handle on Blindsight; I entertained and discarded any number of adaptive functions in search of that grand thematic punchline that would end the book. Yes, my protagonist would realize, self-awareness is absolutely essential because of X. The problem was, I couldn’t find an X that stood up under scrutiny; and it took me far too long to realize that Consciousness is good for nothing at all was the scariest and most existentially gut-churning punchline imaginable.”

— Peter Watts

63. “The Gang of Four may have run multiple systems on a single motherboard, but each had its own distinct topology and they only surfaced one at a time.”

— Peter Watts

64. “As far as anyone could tell, Portia had learned to partition its cognitive processes: almost as if it were emulating a larger brain piece by piece, saving the results of one module to feed into the next. Slices of intellect, built and demolished one after another. No one would ever know for sure – a rogue synthophage had taken out the world’s Salticids before anyone had gotten around to taking a closer look – but the Icarus slime mold seemed to have taken the same basic idea and run with it.”

— Peter Watts

65. “Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Spaceship? Of course. Were they built by naturally evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?”

— Peter Watts

66. “Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Space ship? Of course. Were they built by naturally-evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?” I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. “You know what I mean.” “It’s a meaningless question. Get your head out of the Twentieth Century.”

— Peter Watts

67. “Good parasites are invisible; the best are indispensable. Gut bacteria, chloroplasts, mitochondria: all parasites, once.”

— Peter Watts

68. “It’s kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.”

— Peter Watts

69. “What, you stay awake when you exercise? You don’t find it, um, boring?”

— Peter Watts

70. “A neuron didn’t know whether it fired in response to a scent or a symphony. Brain cells weren’t intelligent; only brains were.”

— Peter Watts

71. “He’s smarter than all of us put together, but sometimes he talks like he’s got a fifty-word vocabulary.” A soft snort. “It’s not like it’d kill him to use an adverb once in a while.”

— Peter Watts

72. “As far as anyone could tell, Portia had learned to partition its cognitive processes: almost as if it were emulating a larger brain piece by piece, saving the results of one module to feed into the next. Slices of intellect, built and demolished one after another.”

— Peter Watts

73. “The brain’s habit of literalizing metaphors – the tendency to regard people as having “warmer” personalities when you happen to be holding a mug of coffee, the Bicamerals’ use of hand-washing to mitigate feelings of guilt and uncertainty – is also an established neurological fact.”

— Peter Watts

74. “I thought it would be cool to make one of the Gang a synesthete, reasoning that someone with cross-wired senses might have an advantage at deciphering the language of aliens with different sensory modalities; then, as I was putting Blindsight to bed, a paper appeared suggesting that synesthesias might be used to solve formal cognitive problems.129 This validates me, and I wish it happened more often.130.”

— Peter Watts

75. “At least with the Catholics, you know that when someone hands you a cracker there’s gonna be wine in the mix at some point.”

— Peter Watts

76. “It was a clear, impenetrable hole in the ship: a circular viewport into an alien terrarium where, out past the ghostly reflection of his own face, strange hyperbaric creatures built monstrous artifacts out of sand and coral. Their eyes twinkled like green stars in the gloom.”

— Peter Watts

77. “They never experience the past tense. It’s just another thread to them. They don’t remember stuff, they relive it.”

— Peter Watts

78. “Nature, though. Nature always welcomed him. She passed no judgements, didn’t care about right or wrong, guilt or innocence.”

— Peter Watts

79. “You might just decide that one life lived on your own recognizance is better than a million unremembered births.”

— Peter Watts

80. “I’ve told you before, Daniel: roach isn’t an insult. We’re the ones still standing after the mammals build their nukes, we’re the ones with the stripped-down OS’s so damned simple they work under almost any circumstances. We’re the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.”

— Peter Watts

81. “Even God can’t plan for everything. Too many variables.”

— Peter Watts

82. “Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why.”

— Peter Watts

83. “All science ever did was measure a teensy sliver of the universe and assume that everything else behaved the same way.”

— Peter Watts

84. “Look, I’d said, say you tell everyone when it is and nothing happens. It’s kind of a slap in the face. Or suppose they throw you a party, Chelsea had replied. Then you don’t know whether they’re doing it sincerely, or if your earlier interaction just guilted them into observing an occasion they’d rather have ignored. But if you don’t tell anyone, and nobody commemorates the event, there’s no reason to feel badly because after all, nobody knew. And.”

— Peter Watts

85. “All this careful conservatism, these shackled environments that barely edged beyond the laws of physics – they only guarded against the Inner Heckler, not these unwelcome sensations intruding from outside.”

— Peter Watts

86. “The reason that stuff goes bad is because it’s crappy old tech. Internal augs are less failure-prone than your own brain.” “So they’ll work flawlessly when some spambot hacks in and leaves me with an irresistible urge to buy a year’s supply of bubble bath for cats.”

— Peter Watts

87. “Why’s a sticky word, though. It’s not especially productive to think of them as agents with agendas. Better to think of them as – as very complex interacting systems, just doing what systems do. Whatever the reagents tell themselves to explain their role in the reaction, it’s not likely to have much to do with the actual chemistry.”

— Peter Watts

88. “It’s the pattern that matters, you see. Not the choice of building materials. Life is information, shaped by natural selection. Carbon’s just fashion, nucleic acids mere optional accessories. Electrons can do all that stuff, if they’re coded the right way. It’s all just pattern.”

— Peter Watts

89. “You can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.”

— Peter Watts

90. “Long before art and science and philosophy arose, consciousness had but one function: not to merely implement motor commands, but to mediate between commands in opposition. In a submerged body starving for air, it’s difficult to imagine two imperatives more opposed than the need to breathe and the need to hold your breath. As one Prismatic told me, “Put yourself in one of those things, and tell me you aren’t more intensely conscious than you’ve ever been in your life.”

— Peter Watts

91. “Nothing’s immortal on a road trip of a billion years. The universe runs down in stop-motion around you, your backups’ backups’ backups need backups. Not even the error-correcting replication strategies cadged from biology can keep the mutations at bay forever. It was true for us meatsicles cycling through mayfly moments every thousand years; it was just as true for the hardware.”

— Peter Watts

92. “You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?”

— Peter Watts

93. “What do you think vision is?” she asked him. “You don’t see a fraction of the things that surround you, and at least half the things you do see are deceptive. Hell, color doesn’t even exist outside your own head. Vision’s just plain wrong; it only persists because it works. If you’re going to dismiss the idea of God, you better stop believing your own eyes in the bargain.”

— Peter Watts

94. “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.” – Emerson M. Pugh.”

— Peter Watts

95. “So many things constrain us, from so many directions. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest. Subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it. After four thousand years we can’t even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects greater than our own.”

— Peter Watts

96. “It was machines that scanned the heavens, machines that probed the space between atoms, machines that asked the questions and designed to experiments to answer them. All that was left for mere meat, apparently, was navel-gazing.”

— Peter Watts

97. “The abyss is a desert; no one can afford the luxury of waiting for better odds.”

— Peter Watts

98. “Fundamentalists who demand that their creation myths be inserted into science classes tend to look at you funny when you suggest that likewise, we could insert passages from On the Origin of Species into the book of Genesis.”

— Peter Watts

99. “Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing – irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness.”

— Peter Watts

100. “Evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we – we were the flukes and the fossils. We.”

— Peter Watts