Quotes from Peter Watts

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.

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.

I've told you before, Daniel: roach isn't an insult. We're the ones still standing after the mammals build their nukes, we're the ones with the stripped-down OS's so damned simple they work under almost any circumstances. We're the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.

ALL ANIMALS ARE UNDER STRINGENT SELECTION PRESSURE TO BE AS STUPID AS THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH. —PETE RICHERSON AND ROBERT BOYD

You might just decide that one life lived on your own recognizance is better than a million unremembered births.

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.

NOT UNTIL WE ARE LOST DO WE BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND OURSELVES. —Henry David Thoreau

People simply can't accept that patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from the semantic content that clings to their surfaces; if you manipulate the topology correctly, that content just comes along for the ride.

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 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.

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.

So many things constrain us, from so many directions. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest. Subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it. After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects greater than our own.

You can be such a reptile sometimes," she said.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness.

you may be doing everything for the wrong reasons and you may be pissing yourself when you do it, but at least you haven't given up.

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't." —Emerson M. Pugh

When you're undead, the emphasis is on the second syllable.

I was just a tattletale for small minds back home.

What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?

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

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

There was no shortage of perspectives. The noosphere seethed with scenarios ranging from utopian to apocalyptic.

The brain's habit of literalizing metaphors—the tendency to regard people as having "warmer" personalities when you happen to be holding a mug of coffee, the Bicamerals' use of hand-washing to mitigate feelings of guilt and uncertainty—is also an established neurological fact.

This is it. The final conscious experience. Enjoy it while it lasts.