Top 100 Peter Watts Quotes
#1. Intuition is not clairvoyance. It's not guesswork either. Intuition is executive summary, that 90 percent of the higher brain that functions subconsciously - but no less rigorously - than the self-aware subroutine that thinks of itself as the person.
Peter Watts
#2. The only reason we were here was because nobody had yet optimized software for First Contact.
Peter Watts
#3. 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.
Peter Watts
#4. 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.
Peter Watts
#5. Hey, chaotic trajectories are just as deterministic as any other kind.
Peter Watts
#6. Nature, though. Nature always welcomed him. She passed no judgements, didn't care about right or wrong, guilt or innocence.
Peter Watts
#7. All science ever did was measure a teensy sliver of the universe and assume that everything else behaved the same way.
Peter Watts
#9. You're the first person I've seen here who's actually dressed like a monk." "It's a bathrobe.
Peter Watts
#10. 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.
Peter Watts
#11. It's kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.
Peter Watts
#12. Sometimes we took refuge in our diving bell while waves of charge and magnetism spiraled languidly past, like boluses of ectoplasm coursing down the intestine of some poltergeist god.
Peter Watts
#13. Mind out of the gutter, Suze. Eros is only one kind of love, eh? Ancient Greeks recognised four.
Peter Watts
#14. Property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.
Peter Watts
#15. Comforting lies get far too easy with practice.
Peter Watts
#16. Innately affectionate, and innately afraid of unreturned affection, and indomitably unwilling to let any of that stop her.
Peter Watts
#17. How do you say 'We come in peace' when the very words are an act of war?
Peter Watts
#18. God is a sadist on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, and His name is Physics.
Peter Watts
#19. And besides, positing universe as program didn't seem to answer the Big Questions so much as kick them down the road another order of magnitude.
Peter Watts
#20. She was an abstraction in an abstraction: an impossible intersection of dozens of bright panes, as if the disassembled tiles of a stained-glass window had each been set aglow and animated. She swirled before me like a school of fish.
Peter Watts
#21. I really wanted to talk to her.
I just couldn't find an algorithm that fit.
Peter Watts
#22. You had hoped that smarter creatures would be wiser ones.
Peter Watts
#23. The great thing about making yourself the villain is nobody's likely to contradict you.
Peter Watts
#25. Sometimes when you see too much, you miss a lot.
Peter Watts
#26. PREDATORS RUN FOR THEIR DINNER. PREY RUN FOR THEIR LIVES.
Peter Watts
#27. You can't see why anyone wouldn't want to wallow in the sheer beauty of language.
Peter Watts
#28. It's the pattern that matters, you see. Not the choice of building materials. 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.
Peter Watts
#29. 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
Peter Watts
#30. You can't kill the thing under the bed. You can only keep it outside the covers.
Peter Watts
#31. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.
Peter Watts
#32. Perfection's unattainable but it isn't unapproachable.
Peter Watts
#33. The laws of physics were the OS of some inconceivable supercomputer called reality.
Peter Watts
#34. I know this hasn't been a seamless narrative. I've had to shatter the story and string its fragments out along a death lasting decades.
Peter Watts
#35. IF YOU ARE GIVEN A CHOICE, YOU BELIEVE YOU HAVE ACTED FREELY.
Peter Watts
#36. Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.
Peter Watts
#37. What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?
Peter Watts
#38. never humanize your victims. It shouldn't have been such an issue when dealing with methane-breathing medusae.
Peter Watts
#39. People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.
Peter Watts
#40. You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?
Peter Watts
#41. 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.
Peter Watts
#43. 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.
Peter Watts
#44. Realist saboteurs do not, as a rule, enjoy long careers. Everyone gets caught eventually.
Peter Watts
#45. When you're undead, the emphasis is on the second syllable.
Peter Watts
#46. And now the game is over, and a single pawn stands on that scorched board and its face is human after all.
Peter Watts
#47. 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.
Peter Watts
#48. Everything's an act. Everything's strategy.
Peter Watts
#49. The Gang of Four may have run multiple systems on a single motherboard, but each had its own distinct topology and they only surfaced one at a time.
Peter Watts
#50. Even God can't plan for everything. Too many variables.
Peter Watts
#51. It's not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion.
Peter Watts
#52. The Zodiac had rearranged itself into a precise grid of bright points with luminous tails. It was as though the whole planet had been caught in some great closing net, the knots of its mesh aglow with St. Elmo's fire. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.
Peter Watts
#53. Newton's First was a real bitch, not open to negotiation.
Peter Watts
#54. 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.
Peter Watts
#55. Let's just agree that neither side has a monopoly on assholes. The point is, once you recognize that every human model of reality is fundamentally unreal, then it all just comes down to which one works best.
Peter Watts
#56. So many things constrain us, from so many directions.
Peter Watts
#57. 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.
Peter Watts
#59. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots?
Peter Watts
#60. This is it. The final conscious experience. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Peter Watts
#61. Most people seem to think that organisms develop adaptive traits in response to environmental change. This is bullshit. The environment changes and those who already happen to have newly adaptive traits don't get wiped out.
Peter Watts
#62. 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.
Peter Watts
#63. I could be the only sentient being in the universe. If I'm even that much. Because I don't know if there is such a thing as a reliable narrator.
Peter Watts
#64. 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.
Peter Watts
#65. Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively.
Peter Watts
#66. 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.
Peter Watts
#67. 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.
Peter Watts
#68. It's the anthropic principle's evil twin, he thought.
Peter Watts
#69. The neurological condition of echopraxia is to autonomy as blindsight is to consciousness.
Peter Watts
#70. But deceleration is for pansies. We're headed for the stars.
Peter Watts
#71. Word of advice," the Colonel said from the other side. "Don't tease the zombies.
Peter Watts
#72. 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.
Peter Watts
#73. Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.
Peter Watts
#74. My friend. And by the time she gets over that jarring idea, she's alone again.
Peter Watts
#75. 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.
Peter Watts
#76. Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.
Peter Watts
#77. What, you stay awake when you exercise? You don't find it, um, boring?
Peter Watts
#78. Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it.
Peter Watts
#79. Nobody gets a good view of a system from the inside, no matter who they are. The view's distorted.
Peter Watts
#81. The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death.
Peter Watts
#82. You think there's something bigger than you out there, you f*****g well keep your head down and hope it doesn't notice.
Peter Watts
#83. The longer it takes me to track you down, the more hope you have of escaping.
Peter Watts
#84. So there's a membrane of - of living tissue around that star," I say, trying to wrap my head around the concept. "A, a meat balloon. Around the whole damn star.
Peter Watts
#85. From those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.
Peter Watts
#86. They never experience the past tense. It's just another thread to them. They don't remember stuff, they relive it.
Peter Watts
#87. 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.
Peter Watts
#88. By now it's got as much in common with its origins as a humpback whale would have with the sperm cells from a therapsid lizard. Still,
Peter Watts
#89. I was just a tattletale for small minds back home.
Peter Watts
#90. 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.
Peter Watts
#91. You can be such a reptile sometimes," she said.
Peter Watts
#92. Plus it'll triple your assimilation rate over anything filtered through the senses. Perfect for porn.
Peter Watts
#93. 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.
Peter Watts
#94. The static's nice. I could do without the screeching."
"Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz.
Peter Watts
#95. People put a lot less effort into picking apart evidence that confirms what they already believe.
Peter Watts
#96. ALL ANIMALS ARE UNDER STRINGENT SELECTION PRESSURE TO BE AS STUPID AS THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH. - PETE RICHERSON AND ROBERT BOYD
Peter Watts
#97. 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?
Peter Watts
#98. Beowulf's Bane, an exotic glowing fungus that ate the flesh of elves, bore an uncanny resemblance to those of necrotizing fasciitis.
Peter Watts
#99. 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.
Peter Watts
#100. Thanks to a vampire and a boatload of freaks and an invading alien horde, I'm Human again.
Peter Watts
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
