Peter Watts Quotes & Sayings

God is a sadist on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, and His name is Physics. — Peter Watts

They never experience the past tense. It's just another thread to them. They don't remember stuff, they relive it. — Peter Watts

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

[T]hey don't care about realpolitik or the big picture. They only care about monkey-wrenching and whistle blowing. — Peter Watts

If there's one thing I'm the world's greatest expert on, it's how it feels to be me. And — Peter Watts

If you have to go up unarmed against an angry T rex with a four-digit IQ, it can't hurt to have a trained combat specialist at your side. At the very least, she might be able to fashion a pointy stick from the branch of some convenient tree. — Peter Watts

I coast through the abyss on the colder side of Neptune's orbit. Most of the time I exist only as an absence, to any observer on the visible spectrum: a moving, asymmetrical silhouette blocking the stars. But occasionally, during my slow endless spin, I glint with dim hints of reflected starlight. If you catch me in those moments you might infer something of my true nature: a segmented creature with foil skin, bristling with joints and dishes and spindly antennae. Here and there a whisper of accumulated frost clings to a joint or seam, some frozen wisp of gas encountered in Jupiter space perhaps. Elsewhere I carry the microscopic corpses of Earthly bacteria who thrived with carefree abandon on the skins of space stations or the benign lunar surface - but who had gone to crystal at only half my present distance from the sun. Now, a breath away from Absolute Zero, they might shatter at a photon's touch. — 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. — 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

You can't kill the thing under the bed. You can only keep it outside the covers. — Peter Watts

The great thing about making yourself the villain is nobody's likely to contradict you. — Peter Watts

The GA's new recruits have to be the slowest learners since the eradication of Down's syndrome. — Peter Watts

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

Hey, chaotic trajectories are just as deterministic as any other kind. — Peter Watts

It's not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion. — Peter Watts

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

It actually did remind him of a spider, in fact. One particular genus that had become legendary among invertebrate zoologists and computational physicists alike: a problem-solver that improvised and drew up plans far beyond anything that should have been able to fit into such a pinheaded pair of ganglia. Portia. The eight-legged cat, some had called it. The spider that thought like a mammal. — Peter Watts

I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms." There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. "But I do only what you force me to. You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt - species die - and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is. — Peter Watts

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

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

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

Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological - but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing. You can't imagine such a being, can you? The term being doesn't even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you can't quite put your finger on. — Peter Watts

Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding - a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. Eventually, of course, they'd wither and die; the cone would simply dissipate at its wide end, its permutations senescent and exhausted.
There were exceptions, of course. Every now and then a single thread persisted, grew thick and gnarled and unkillable: conspiracy theories and urban legends, the hooks embedded in popular songs, the comforting Easter-bunny lies of religious doctrine. These were the memes: viral concepts, infections of conscious thought. Some flared and died like mayflies. Others lasted a thousand years or more, tricked billions into the endless propagation of parasitic half-truths. — Peter Watts

Floaters swarmed through his eyeballs like schools of panicked fish. — Peter Watts

They know God exists already that's old. I think now they're trying to figure what to do with It." "What to do with God." "Maybe worship. Maybe disinfect. — Peter Watts

Technology implies belligerence. — Peter Watts

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

We've surpassed ourselves now, we're exploring terrain beyond the limits of merely human understanding. Sometimes its contours, even in conventional space, are just too intricate for our brains to track; other times its very axes extend into dimensions inconceivable to minds built to fuck and fight on some prehistoric grassland. So many things constrain us, from so many directions. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest. Subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it. After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects greater than our own. But we're not very good at building them. — Peter Watts

Everything's an act. Everything's strategy. — Peter Watts

I was alone in a great spinning wheel surrounded by things that were made out of meat, things that moved all by themselves. Some of them were wrapped in pieces of cloth. Strange nonsensical sounds came from holes at their top ends, and there were other things up there, bumps and ridges and something like marbles or black buttons, wet and shiny and embedded in the slabs of meat. They glistened and jiggled and moved as if trying to escape. I didn't understand the sounds the meat was making, but I heard a voice from somewhere. It was like God talking, and that I couldn't help but understand. — Peter Watts

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

Tools exist for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. — Peter Watts

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

Come on, you guys." Caraco leans back against the drying rack. "Can't you settle this some other way? Maybe you could just whip out a ruler and compare your dicks or something. — Peter Watts

Look, I'd said, say you tell everyone when it is and nothing happens. It's kind of a slap in the face. Or suppose they throw you a party, Chelsea had replied. Then you don't know whether they're doing it sincerely, or if your earlier interaction just guilted them into observing an occasion they'd rather have ignored. But if you don't tell anyone, and nobody commemorates the event, there's no reason to feel badly because after all, nobody knew. And — Peter Watts

in some half-forgotten pesthole of twentieth-century case studies - filed under Cotard's syndrome - I found Amanda Bates and others of her kind, their brains torqued into denial of the very self. — Peter Watts

My friend. And by the time she gets over that jarring idea, she's alone again. — Peter Watts

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

And now the game is over, and a single pawn stands on that scorched board and its face is human after all. — Peter Watts

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

Planck length and Planck time had always looked a bit too much like pixel dimensions for comfort. — 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

Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Space ship? Of course. Were they built by naturally-evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?" I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. "You know what I mean." "It's a meaningless question. Get your head out of the Twentieth Century. — Peter Watts

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

Imagine you are a machine.

Yes, I know. But imagine you're a different kind of machine, one built from metal and plastic and designed not by blind, haphazard natural selection but by engineers and astrophysicists with their eyes fixed firmly on specific goals. Imagine that your purpose is not to replicate, or even to survive, but to gather information.

I can imagine that easily. It is in fact a much simpler impersonation than the kind I'm usually called on to perform. — Peter Watts

Brain's got all kinds of gauges. You can know you're blind even when you're not; you can know you can see, even when you're blind. And yeah, you can know you don't exist even when you do. It's a long list, commissar. Cotard's, Anton's, Damascus disease. Just for starters. — Peter Watts

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

And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars? — Peter Watts

When you're undead, the emphasis is on the second syllable. — Peter Watts

We were all in it together, of course, desperate to regain some hypothetical upper hand by any means necessary. — Peter Watts

It's kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven. — Peter Watts

You had hoped that smarter creatures would be wiser ones. — Peter Watts

The laws of physics were the OS of some inconceivable supercomputer called reality. — Peter Watts

Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all - raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire. — Peter Watts

IF YOU ARE GIVEN A CHOICE, YOU BELIEVE YOU HAVE ACTED FREELY. — Peter Watts

Nobody used an industrial vortex engine to run kitchen appliances. — Peter Watts

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

There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance. The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus. Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies. The signal is an attack. — Peter Watts

Innately affectionate, and innately afraid of unreturned affection, and indomitably unwilling to let any of that stop her. — Peter Watts

She was attractive, but so was everyone in this kind of light; the longer the wavelength, the softer the focus. There's a reason fuckcubbies don't come with fluorescent lights. — Peter Watts

But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension. — Peter Watts

So much anger in here. So much hate. So much to take out on someone.
This time it's going to count. She's adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, three hundred kilometers from land. She's alone. She has nothing to eat. It doesn't matter. None of it matters. She's alive; that alone gives her the upper hand. — Peter Watts

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

(At least one theory suggests that while great apes and adult
Humans are sentient, young Human children are not. I admit to a
certain fondness for this conclusion; if childen aren't nonsentient,
they're certainly psychopathic) — Peter Watts

I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition - the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe - and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck.
To this day, I still don't know what went wrong. — 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 used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I. — Peter Watts

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. — Peter Watts

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

Psychopathy's no disorder in those shoes, eh? Just a survival strategy. — Peter Watts

The only reason we were here was because nobody had yet optimized software for First Contact. — Peter Watts

Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world that poses no threat? — Peter Watts

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

You said it was colorful. What changed?"
"I don't know. Maybe nothing. I just - I don't actually remember the dreams when I wake up any more."
"So how do you know you still have them?" Pag asked.
Fuck it I thought, and tipped back the last of my pint in a single gulp. "I know."
"How?"
I frowned, taken aback. I had to think for a few moments before I remembered.
"I wake up smiling," I said. — Peter Watts

He couldn't be bothered to work out the acceleration of free-falling bodies that gained weight with each meter, but down the length of the spoke he was pretty sure they all ended in splat. — Peter Watts

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

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

Transcendence is transformation. — Peter Watts

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

Comforting lies get far too easy with practice. — Peter Watts

The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death. — Peter Watts

The math was irrefutable: The one winning strategy was concealment. Only fools revealed their birthdays. — Peter Watts

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

So many things constrain us, from so many directions. — Peter Watts

To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. — Peter Watts

Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail. — Peter Watts

The longer it takes me to track you down, the more hope you have of escaping. — Peter Watts

I was just a tattletale for small minds back home. — Peter Watts

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

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

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

Realist saboteurs do not, as a rule, enjoy long careers. Everyone gets caught eventually. — Peter Watts

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

You can't see why anyone wouldn't want to wallow in the sheer beauty of language. — Peter Watts

Long before art and science and philosophy arose, consciousness had but one function: not to merely implement motor commands, but to mediate between commands in opposition. In a submerged body starving for air, it's difficult to imagine two imperatives more opposed than the need to breathe and the need to hold your breath. As one Prismatic told me, Put yourself in one of those things, and tell me you aren't more intensely conscious than you've ever been in your life. — Peter Watts

Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary - almost an afterthought - to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other. But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you. — Peter Watts

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

Nothing up there tonight but entropy, and the same imaginary shapes that people had been imposing on nature since they'd first thought to wonder at the heavens. — Peter Watts

Everyone's got intimacy issues these days, in case you hadn't noticed. He must have; the population had been dropping for decades. — Peter Watts

Evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we - we were the flukes and the fossils. We — Peter Watts

Nowadays it seemed like half the technical data on the planet were being stored genetically. Try sequencing a lung fluke and it was even money whether the base pairs you read would code for protein or the technical specs on the Denver sewer system. — Peter Watts