Peter Watts Quotes

you gotta let go of this whole self thing. Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain.

PREDATORS RUN FOR THEIR DINNER. PREY RUN FOR THEIR LIVES.

We climbed this hill. Each step up we could see farther, so of course we kept going. Now we're at the top. Science has been at the top for a few centuries now. And we look out across the plain and we see this other tribe dancing around above the clouds, even higher than we are. Maybe it's a mirage, maybe it's a trick. Or maybe they just climbed a higher peak we can't see because the clouds are blocking the view. So we head off to find out - but every step takes us downhill. No matter what direction we head, we can't move off our peak without losing our vantage point. So we climb back up again. We're trapped on a local maximum. But what if there is a higher peak out there, way across the plain? The only way to get there is to bite the bullet, come down off our foothill and trudge along the riverbed until we finally start going uphill again. And it's only then you realize: Hey, this mountain reaches way higher than that foothill we were on before, and we can see so much better from up here. But you can't get there unless you leave behind all the tools that made you so successful in the first place. You have to take that first step downhill.

The math was irrefutable: The one winning strategy was concealment. Only fools revealed their birthdays.

After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer.

The smallest multicorp killed more people than all the sex killers who ever lived, for a fucking profit margin - and the WTO gave them awards for it.

Technology implies belligerence.

And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?

The laws of physics were the OS of some inconceivable supercomputer called reality.

Centuries of navel-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster.

I explored it all.

Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Nirretranders said it was a fraud; Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger wouldn't even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: no system can fully understand itself.

Not even the synthesists had been able to rotate it down. The load-bearing beams just couldn't take the strain.

All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those theories, all those drugdreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for. None needed: obviously, consciousness makes us what we are. It lets us see the beauty and the ugliness. It elevates us into the exalted realm of the spiritual. Oh, a few outsiders - Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who barely achieved obscurity - wondered briefly at the why of it: why not soft computers, and no more? Why should nonsentient systems be inherently inferior? But they never really raised their voices above the crowd. The value of what we are was

Hell, rationality itself - the exalted Human ability to reason - hadn't evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will.

People have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You

Thanks to a vampire and a boatload of freaks and an invading alien horde, I'm Human again.

My genes done gone and tricked my brain
By making fucking feel so great
That's how the little creeps attain
Their plan to fuckin' replicate
But brain's got tricks itself, you see
To get the bang but not the bite
I got this here vasectomy
My genes can fuck themselves tonight.
- The R-Selectors, Trunclade

It's kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.

Perhaps they'd been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment's notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldn't fight something like that, you couldn't fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals.
Or maybe just accepting that that's what they'd always been.

The GA's new recruits have to be the slowest learners since the eradication of Down's syndrome.

I was alone in a great spinning wheel surrounded by things that were made out of meat, things that moved all by themselves. Some of them were wrapped in pieces of cloth. Strange nonsensical sounds came from holes at their top ends, and there were other things up there, bumps and ridges and something like marbles or black buttons, wet and shiny and embedded in the slabs of meat. They glistened and jiggled and moved as if trying to escape. I didn't understand the sounds the meat was making, but I heard a voice from somewhere. It was like God talking, and that I couldn't help but understand.

Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively.

Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world that poses no threat?

Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith.

I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center. I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain.
I am the curtain.

How is an elephant like a schizophrenic?"
"I – what?"
"An elephant never forgets."
He said nothing.
"That's an AI joke," she said after a while.

Nobody used an industrial vortex engine to run kitchen appliances.

But then I remembered: the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really nowhere else to go.

We're hard-core realists - we just pay lip service to death and decay and keep right on feeling immortal anyway.

I could be the only sentient being in the universe. If I'm even that much. Because I don't know if there is such a thing as a reliable narrator.

Most people seem to think that organisms develop adaptive traits in response to environmental change. This is bullshit. The environment changes and those who already happen to have newly adaptive traits don't get wiped out.

You think there's something bigger than you out there, you f*****g well keep your head down and hope it doesn't notice.

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

Sometimes we took refuge in our diving bell while waves of charge and magnetism spiraled languidly past, like boluses of ectoplasm coursing down the intestine of some poltergeist god.

IF YOU ARE GIVEN A CHOICE, YOU BELIEVE YOU HAVE ACTED FREELY.

Property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.

The vampires win every time.

So many things constrain us, from so many directions.

Everything's an act. Everything's strategy.

Even God can't plan for everything. Too many variables.

Sometimes when you see too much, you miss a lot.

I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms." There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. "But I do only what you force me to. You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt - species die - and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is.

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.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.

Fhat thouding do're.

If you have to go up unarmed against an angry T rex with a four-digit IQ, it can't hurt to have a trained combat specialist at your side. At the very least, she might be able to fashion a pointy stick from the branch of some convenient tree.

I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke's liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one's looking.

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.

Semmelweis reflex. They

What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?

The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death.

IMAGINE YOU ARE Siri Keeton. You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate, flesh peels apart from flesh, ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. You'd scream if you had the breath.

Come on, you guys." Caraco leans back against the drying rack. "Can't you settle this some other way? Maybe you could just whip out a ruler and compare your dicks or something.

You can't kill the thing under the bed. You can only keep it outside the covers.

Let's just agree that neither side has a monopoly on assholes. The point is, once you recognize that every human model of reality is fundamentally unreal, then it all just comes down to which one works best.

You can't see why anyone wouldn't want to wallow in the sheer beauty of language.

I know this hasn't been a seamless narrative. I've had to shatter the story and string its fragments out along a death lasting decades.

[consciousness] Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterward, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that waking souls are only slaves in denial.

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.

The Colonel grunted. "In my experience, those things don't have to try to scare the shit out of anyone. If she wanted you dead or broken, you would be. Vampires have - idiomatic speech patterns. You may have simply misunderstood her." "She called me a cold cut.

But we're not very good at building them. The forced matings of minds and electrons succeed and fail with equal spectacle. Our hybrids become as brilliant as savants, and as autistic. We graft people to prosthetics, make their overloaded motor strips juggle meat and machinery, and shake our heads when their fingers twitch and their tongues stutter. Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left
behind.

Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary - almost an afterthought - to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other. But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you.

(At least one theory suggests that while great apes and adult
Humans are sentient, young Human children are not. I admit to a
certain fondness for this conclusion; if childen aren't nonsentient,
they're certainly psychopathic)

The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.

But deceleration is for pansies. We're headed for the stars.

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.

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.

People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.

Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding - a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. Eventually, of course, they'd wither and die; the cone would simply dissipate at its wide end, its permutations senescent and exhausted.
There were exceptions, of course. Every now and then a single thread persisted, grew thick and gnarled and unkillable: conspiracy theories and urban legends, the hooks embedded in popular songs, the comforting Easter-bunny lies of religious doctrine. These were the memes: viral concepts, infections of conscious thought. Some flared and died like mayflies. Others lasted a thousand years or more, tricked billions into the endless propagation of parasitic half-truths.

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of a manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

I think I'll call you Cygnus," Chelsea said.
"The swan?" I said. A bit precious, but it could have been worse.
She shook her head. "Black hole. Cygnus X-1.

Mind out of the gutter, Suze. Eros is only one kind of love, eh? Ancient Greeks recognised four.

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

Realist saboteurs do not, as a rule, enjoy long careers. Everyone gets caught eventually.

It actually did remind him of a spider, in fact. One particular genus that had become legendary among invertebrate zoologists and computational physicists alike: a problem-solver that improvised and drew up plans far beyond anything that should have been able to fit into such a pinheaded pair of ganglia. Portia. The eight-legged cat, some had called it. The spider that thought like a mammal.

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.

Nine days after Perreault first saw the woman in black, an Indonesian mother of four came out of her tent long enough to claim that the mermaid had risen, fully-formed, from the very center of the quake.
One of her boys, hearing this, said that he'd heard it was the other way around.

But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension.

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.

It's not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion.

Electrophoresis.

Szpindel's eyebrows drew together like courting caterpillars.

I coast through the abyss on the colder side of Neptune's orbit. Most of the time I exist only as an absence, to any observer on the visible spectrum: a moving, asymmetrical silhouette blocking the stars. But occasionally, during my slow endless spin, I glint with dim hints of reflected starlight. If you catch me in those moments you might infer something of my true nature: a segmented creature with foil skin, bristling with joints and dishes and spindly antennae. Here and there a whisper of accumulated frost clings to a joint or seam, some frozen wisp of gas encountered in Jupiter space perhaps. Elsewhere I carry the microscopic corpses of Earthly bacteria who thrived with carefree abandon on the skins of space stations or the benign lunar surface - but who had gone to crystal at only half my present distance from the sun. Now, a breath away from Absolute Zero, they might shatter at a photon's touch.

I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition - the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe - and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck.
To this day, I still don't know what went wrong.

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.

You can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.

While a number of people have pointed out the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn't more trouble than it's worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they're probably right. I hope they are. "Blindsight" is a thought experiment, a game of "Just suppose" and "What if". Nothing more.
On the other hand, the dodos and the Steller sea cows could have used exactly the same argument to prove their own superioirity, a thousand years ago: "if we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct?" Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The biggest boys on the block at any given time aren't necessarily the fittest, or the most efficient, and the game isn't over. The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death. And so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost.

never humanize your victims. It shouldn't have been such an issue when dealing with methane-breathing medusae.

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains - cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.

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

The premise of Ezequiel Morsella's PRISM model7,8 is that consciousness originally evolved for the delightfully mundane purpose of mediating conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles. (I have to point out that exactly the same sort of conflict - the impulse to withdraw one's hand from a painful stimulus, versus the knowledge that you'll die if you act on that impulse - was exactly how the Bene Gesserit assessed whether Paul Atreides qualified as "Human" during their gom jabbar test in Frank Herbert's Dune.)

Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for - if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it...
Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt - denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.
Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both a

Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all - raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.

To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were.

If believing absurd falsehoods increase the odds of getting laid or avoiding predators, your brain will believe those falsehoods with all its metaphorical little heart.

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

But only part of him was listening. Another part, even if it hadn't read Chomsky or Jung or Sheldrake - who had time for dead guys anyway? - at least had a basic understanding of what those guys had gone on about. Quantum nonlocality, quantum consciousness - Desjardins had seen too many cases of mass coincidence to dismiss the idea that nine billion human minds could be imperceptibly interconnected somehow. He'd never really thought about it much, but on some level he'd believed in the Collective Unconscious for years.
He just hadn't realized that the fucking thing had a death wish.

Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.

They think they're really sticking it to you, but they're being - herded. Into the service of agendas they'd never support in a thousand years, if they only knew. And they're dedicated, Daniel. They're ferocious. They fight your wars with a passion you could never buy and never coerce, because they're doing it out of pure ideology.

Psychopathy's no disorder in those shoes, eh? Just a survival strategy.

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.

By now it's got as much in common with its origins as a humpback whale would have with the sperm cells from a therapsid lizard. Still,

I was just a tattletale for small minds back home.