Quotes by Peter Watts

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Peter Watts

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

Peter Watts

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

Peter Watts

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

Peter Watts

Nature, though. Nature always welcomed him. She passed no judgements, didn’t care about right or wrong, guilt or innocence.

Peter Watts

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

The laws of physics were the OS of some inconceivable supercomputer called .

Peter Watts

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

I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the...

Peter Watts

Computation, after all, implied a problem not yet solved, insights not yet achieved. There was really only one sort of program for which foreknowledge of the outcome didn't diminish the point of exercise, and Brüks had never been able to find any re...

Peter Watts

At least with the Catholics, you know that when someone hands you a cracker there’s gonna be wine in the mix at some point.

Peter Watts

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

Peter Watts

Everything’s an act. Everything’s strategy.

Peter Watts

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

Peter Watts

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms ...

Peter Watts

The static’s nice. I could do without the screeching.” “Are you kidding? That’s the music of the spheres, commissar. It’s . Like old jazz.

Peter Watts

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.

Peter Watts

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.

Peter Watts

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

Peter Watts

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.

Peter Watts

Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worst than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing.

Peter Watts