Quotes from Peter Watts

consciousness] Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterward, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that waking souls are only slaves in denial.

Evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we—we were the flukes and the fossils. We

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies.

Come on, you guys." Caraco leans back against the drying rack. "Can't you settle this some other way? Maybe you could just whip out a ruler and compare your dicks or something.

if you're smart enough to do the job, you're too smart to trust with the controls.

How do you know? Maybe you're just out of the loop, maybe those orthogonal stealthnets are running you the way you think you're running Rakshi. You think everyone on the planet's a puppet except for Colonel Jim Moore?

He's smarter than all of us put together, but sometimes he talks like he's got a fifty-word vocabulary." A soft snort. "It's not like it'd kill him to use an adverb once in a while.

A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere.

How is an elephant like a schizophrenic?" "I – what?" "An elephant never forgets." He said nothing. "That's an AI joke," she said after a while.

Fundamentalists who demand that their creation myths be inserted into science classes tend to look at you funny when you suggest that likewise, we could insert passages from On the Origin of Species into the book of Genesis.

We're dead anyway, all we get to choose is the exit strategy.

Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why

THE INTUITIVE MIND IS A SACRED GIFT AND THE RATIONAL MIND IS A FAITHFUL SERVANT. WE HAVE CREATED A SOCIETY THAT HONORS THE SERVANT AND HAS FORGOTTEN THE GIFT. —ALBERT EINSTEIN (APOCRYPHAL)

Don't feel too bad. Everyone's in chains here. Eriophora's a slave ship. We cavemen are shackled by our need for air and food and water, by the disorienting discontinuity of lives cut into slices spread centuries apart. The Chimp is shackled by its own stupidity, And you, well...

it's not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion. Though

something ELSE set your body in motion, sent an executive summary - almost an afterthought - to the homunculus behind your eyes ...that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as The person, mistakes correlation for causality," ...and thinks He moved the finger

The Colonel grunted. "In my experience, those things don't have to try to scare the shit out of anyone. If she wanted you dead or broken, you would be. Vampires have—idiomatic speech patterns. You may have simply misunderstood her." "She called me a cold cut.

He couldn't be bothered to work out the acceleration of free-falling bodies that gained weight with each meter, but down the length of the spoke he was pretty sure they all ended in splat.

I'll kill you if I can." "I'll save you," it said. "If you let me.

As far as anyone could tell, Portia had learned to partition its cognitive processes: almost as if it were emulating a larger brain piece by piece, saving the results of one module to feed into the next. Slices of intellect, built and demolished one after another.

Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.

in some half-forgotten pesthole of twentieth-century case studies—filed under Cotard's syndrome—I found Amanda Bates and others of her kind, their brains torqued into denial of the very self.

I deal with other people's information. I don't vomit my own personal life into the public sphere.

proprioceptive polyneuropathy.