Peter Watts, Blindsight Quotes

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.

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.

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

Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.

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

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

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.

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

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

The static’s nice. I could do without the screechi

But then I remembered: the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really nowhere else to go.

You can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.

The vampires win every time.

Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life meunderstand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.

Technology implies belligerence.

I don't understand how meat like you survived to adulthood.

Perfection’s unattainable but it isn’t unapproachable.

After four thousand years we can’t even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer.

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

Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively.

Everything’s an act. Everything’s strategy.