Top 27 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Watts

If believing absurd falsehoods increase the odds of getting laid or avoiding predators, your brain will believe those falsehoods with all its metaphorical little heart.

Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith.

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.

If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert

Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz.

Humans didn't really fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to bloodlines and limited resources.

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.

Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hard-wired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other - deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway.

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.

What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?

You are. I'm just fatalistically cheerful. 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.

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

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.

Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.

But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension.

It’s not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion.

Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it.

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.

Property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.

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.

We are not thinking machines.

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.

The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.

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

I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center. I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. I am the curtain.

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