Quotes from Peter Watts

Grey syndrome.

Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions can be just as blinding.

heterocyclics.

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force on 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.

Their marriage decayed with the exponential determinism of a radioactive isotope and still he sought her out, and accepted her conditions.

The ghosts followed us back.

Not blind chance. Blindsight. Amanda? Respond, please." "Blindsight?" "Nothing wrong with the receptors," he said distractedly. "Brain processes the image but it can't access it. Brain stem takes over." "Your brain stem can see but you can't?

It's the anthropic principle's evil twin, he thought.

He felt like some overgrown pupa plagued by second thoughts, trying to climb back into its husk.

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.

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?

If there's one thing I'm the world's greatest expert on, it's how it feels to be me. And

THE HUMAN BRAIN WERE SO SIMPLE THAT WE COULD UNDERSTAND IT, WE WOULD BE SO SIMPLE THAT WE COULDN'T. —Emerson M. Pugh

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.

The vampires win every time.

Newton's First was a real bitch, not open to negotiation.

T]hey don't care about realpolitik or the big picture. They only care about monkey-wrenching and whistle blowing.

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.

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. Rorschach does nothing to you that you don't already do to yourselves.

We can use logic when we want to, of course. We have tools of reason at our command; but according to at least some experts1 we have those tools not to glean truth from falsehood but to help us win arguments; to make others do what we want; to use as a weapon. It's rhetoric and manipulation that evolution selected for: logic just tagged along as a side effect. Sweeping oratory, rational debate, it's all just a way to bend others to your will.

Here in the dusk of the twenty-first century it was so easy to confuse murder with the amputation of a fingertip.

My friend. And by the time she gets over that jarring idea, she's alone 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

I glanced around at all that customized abstraction: internal feedback, lucidly dreamed. "You're omnipotent in here. Desire anything, imagine anything; there it is. I'd thought it would have changed you more.