Quotes from Peter Watts

SPECIES USED TO GO EXTINCT. NOW THEY GO ON HIATUS. —Deborah MacLennan, Tables of our Reconstruction

How do you say We come in peace when the very words are an act of war?

Human nature was becoming an assembly-line edit, Humanity itself increasingly relegated from production to product.

alien meant in a world where members of his own species stitched themselves together into colony minds, or summoned their own worst nightmares back from the Pleistocene to run the stock market.

What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But

Semmelweis reflex. They

REALITY IS THAT WHICH, WHEN YOU STOP BELIEVING IN IT, DOESN'T GO AWAY. —PHILIP K. DICK

Only fools revealed their birthdays.

And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even

Phaistos Disk.

If you've got the senses and reflexes to hide between someone's saccades, why stop there? Why not do something that really works?

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 HAVE NEVER FOR ONE INSTANT SEEN CLEARLY WITHIN MYSELF. HOW THEN WOULD YOU HAVE ME JUDGE THE DEEDS OF OTHERS? —MAURICE MAETERLINCK

You have a naïve understanding of evolutionary processes. There's no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternatives.

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.

He may have been wrong. I may have been. But that, that distance—that chronic sense of being an alien among your own kind—it's not entirely a bad thing.

ALL KINDS OF ANIMALS COMING HERE. OCCASIONAL DEMONS TOO. —Ian Anderson, Catfish Rising

consciousness had but one function: not to merely implement motor commands, but to mediate between commands in opposition.

ALL ANIMALS ARE UNDER STRINGENT SELECTION PRESSURE TO BE AS STUPID AS THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH.

Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

Extended periods of lungfish-like dormancy8 (the "undead" state) developed in response, as a means of reducing vampires' energetic needs. Vampires

You never finish a book. You only abandon it.

Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.

hyperbolic discounting, and