Quotes from Peter Watts

we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.

You know what happens when you keep a dog locked away from every living thing, except you visit once a day and kick the shit out of him?" Perreault laughed nervously. "Someone actually tried that?" "What happens is, the dog's a social animal, and it gets so lonely it actually looks forward to the shit-kicking. It asks to be kicked. It begs.

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.

Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological—but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing. You can't imagine such a being, can you? The term being doesn't even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you can't quite put your finger on.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain. You're already a different person than you were ten minutes ago.

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

Imagine you are a machine. Yes, I know. But imagine you're a different kind of machine, one built from metal and plastic and designed not by blind, haphazard natural selection but by engineers and astrophysicists with their eyes fixed firmly on specific goals. Imagine that your purpose is not to replicate, or even to survive, but to gather information. I can imagine that easily. It is in fact a much simpler impersonation than the kind I'm usually called on to perform.

We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we're all gonna die before it ends.

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.

You said it was colorful. What changed?" "I don't know. Maybe nothing. I just— I don't actually remember the dreams when I wake up any more." "So how do you know you still have them?" Pag asked. Fuck it I thought, and tipped back the last of my pint in a single gulp. "I know." "How?" I frowned, taken aback. I had to think for a few moments before I remembered. "I wake up smiling," I said.

We appear to be hardwired to punish those who have slighted us, even if—and this is the counterintuitive bit—even if our acts of vengeance hurt us more than those who have trespassed against us.

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.

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

I visited blathernodes, soaked myself in other people's opinions.

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.

PROBLEMS CANNOT BE SOLVED AT THE SAME LEVEL OF AWARENESS THAT CREATED THEM. –ALBERT EINSTEIN