Peter Watts Quotes

People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.

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

But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.

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

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.

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

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.

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

We are not thinking machines.

Technology implies belligerence.

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

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

The neurological condition of echopraxia is to autonomy as blindsight is to consciousness.

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

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.

It’s kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.

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.

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

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

Perfection’s unattainable but it isn’t unapproachable.

Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat.

Transcendence is transformation.

It’s really kind of… well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know ‘em. We’re all beautiful.

Everyone’s running from something.

Word of advice, ” the Colonel said from the other side. “Don’t tease the zombies.

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

Everything’s an act. Everything’s strategy.