Quotes from Peter Watts

archetypal middleman; his career had coasted to that comfortable plateau above those who actually did productive work, but safely short of a position where he had to make any vital decisions.

Linguists don't use it?" I knew some that did. "We don't." And the others are hacks. "Thing about game theory is, it assumes rational self-interest among the players. And people just aren't rational.

IF I CAN BUT MAKE THE WORDS AWAKE THE FEELING. —Ian Anderson, Stand Up

They're not gods," Brüks reminded him softly. "Not yet." "Not ever." "That's denial." "Better than genuflection.

cellular machinery at

even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do.

Earlier generations had worshipped malign and capricious spirits. Ours put its faith in an ordered universe.

The gut was not a long-range organ. Its grasp of culpability degraded exponentially with distance; there

TRY TO TOUCH THE PAST. TRY TO DEAL WITH THE PAST. IT'S NOT REAL. IT'S JUST A DREAM. —Ted Bundy

once you recognize that every human model of reality is fundamentally unreal, then it all just comes down to which one works best.

synesthete.

Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.

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

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.

There's no such things 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 alternative.

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.

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.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.

I really wanted to talk to her. I just couldn't find an algorithm that fit.

Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worse than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing.

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

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

but you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it's a work-around. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It's noble, it's maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.

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.