Quotes from Peter Watts

The abyss is a desert; no one can afford the luxury of waiting for better odds.

We're not thinking machines, we're—we're feeling machines that happen to think.

Mind out of the gutter, Suze. Eros is only one kind of love, eh? Ancient Greeks recognised four.

but sociopaths don't blend in well." "Maybe the ones that get diagnosed don't, but by definition they're the bottom of the class. The others are too smart to get caught, and real automatons would do even better. Besides, when you get powerful enough, you don't need to act like other people. Other people start acting like you.

At least one theory suggests that while great apes and adult Humans are sentient, young Human children are not.101 I admit to a certain fondness for this conclusion; if childen aren't nonsentient, they're certainly psychopathic). But

I was trying to get a handle on Blindsight; I entertained and discarded any number of adaptive functions in search of that grand thematic punchline that would end the book. Yes, my protagonist would realize, self-awareness is absolutely essential because of X. The problem was, I couldn't find an X that stood up under scrutiny; and it took me far too long to realize that Consciousness is good for nothing at all was the scariest and most existentially gut-churning punchline imaginable.

Conventional economics is a pyramid scheme, predicated on a model of unlimited growth in a resource-limited environment; if it was a physics model, it would be perpetual motion. It's bound to break sometime.)

You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?

We're on the bleeding edge of theistic virology here.

The difference between Science and Faith, therefore, is no more and no less than predictive power. Scientific insights have proven to be better predictors than Spiritual ones, at least in worldly matters; they prevail not because they are true, but simply because they work.

It was machines that scanned the heavens, machines that probed the space between atoms, machines that asked the questions and designed to experiments to answer them. All that was left for mere meat, apparently, was navel-gazing.

Nothing up there tonight but entropy, and the same imaginary shapes that people had been imposing on nature since they'd first thought to wonder at the heavens.

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.

She spun a hundred-eighty degrees at the end of the passageway, landed like an acrobat beside the drum hatch. "The reason. Why something would attack us even if we didn't have anything it wanted." I read it off her: "If it wasn't attacking at all. If it was defending itself.

They think they're really sticking it to you, but they're being—herded. Into the service of agendas they'd never support in a thousand years, if they only knew. And they're dedicated, Daniel. They're ferocious. They fight your wars with a passion you could never buy and never coerce, because they're doing it out of pure ideology.

Life evolves. Parasites evolve. Sex evolves to counter the parasites. Shuffles the genes so the parasites have to shoot for a moving target. Everything else—species diversity, density-dependence, everything—it all follows from those three laws. You get a self-replicating string past a certain threshold, it's like a nuclear reaction.

still can't get any correlations that make sense." He sighed. "At least with the Catholics, you know that when someone hands you a cracker there's gonna be wine in the mix at some point.

Nothing's immortal on a road trip of a billion years. The universe runs down in stop-motion around you, your backups' backups' backups need backups. Not even the error-correcting replication strategies cadged from biology can keep the mutations at bay forever. It was true for us meatsicles cycling through mayfly moments every thousand years; it was just as true for the hardware.

TO HIMSELF EVERYONE IS IMMORTAL; HE MAY KNOW THAT HE IS GOING TO DIE, BUT HE CAN NEVER KNOW THAT HE IS DEAD. —

The reason that stuff goes bad is because it's crappy old tech. Internal augs are less failure-prone than your own brain." "So they'll work flawlessly when some spambot hacks in and leaves me with an irresistible urge to buy a year's supply of bubble bath for cats.

Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Spaceship? 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?

A.S.," Brüks repeated. "What's it stand for?" "Artificial Stupidity.

The great thing about making yourself the villain is nobody's likely to contradict you.

Hell, Neil Gaiman took a classic that nine-year-old Peter Watts devoured without any trouble at all—Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book—and dumbed it down to an (admittedly award-winning) story about ghosts and vampires, aimed at an audience who might find a story about sapient wolves and tigers too challenging. It may only be a matter of time before Nineteen Eighty Four is reissued using only words from the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.