Blindsight Peter Watts Quotes & Sayings

If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer except slanging or silence. — G.K. Chesterton

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

Then, having thus made the Creator responsible for all those pains and diseases and miseries above enumerated, and which he could have prevented, the gifted Christian blandly calls him Our Father!
It is as I tell you. He equips the Creator with every trait that goes to the making of a fiend, and then arrives at the conclusion that a fiend and a father are the same thing! Yet he would deny that a malevolent lunatic and a Sunday school superintendent are essentially the same. — Mark Twain

Pick up a bee from kindness, and learn the limitations of kindness. — Idries Shah

We will work as a group, we need to be a real team, that is the only way to go far — Francesco Totti

Peter Watts has taken the core myths of the First Contact story and shaken them to pieces. The result is a shocking and mesmerizing performance, a tour-de-force of provocative and often alarming ideas. It is a rare novel that has the potential to set science fiction on an entirely new course. Blindsight is such a book. — Karl Schroeder

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

While a number of people have pointed out the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn't more trouble than it's worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they're probably right. I hope they are. "Blindsight" is a thought experiment, a game of "Just suppose" and "What if". Nothing more.
On the other hand, the dodos and the Steller sea cows could have used exactly the same argument to prove their own superioirity, a thousand years ago: "if we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct?" Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The biggest boys on the block at any given time aren't necessarily the fittest, or the most efficient, and the game isn't over. The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death. And so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost. — Peter Watts

depression lowers attention span, tolerance for frustration, and memory. Behavior is affected by lowered motivation, loss of ability to experience pleasure, and fatigue. The body is affected by headaches, stomachaches, and muscle tension. Relationships are affected by a tendency to withdraw and become isolated with loneliness. — Archibald D. Hart

It's amazing how everyone has an opinion on how you should live your life. — Sherry Stringfield

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

I thought it would be cool to make one of the Gang a synesthete, reasoning that someone with cross-wired senses might have an advantage at deciphering the language of aliens with different sensory modalities; then, as I was putting Blindsight to bed, a paper appeared suggesting that synesthesias might be used to solve formal cognitive problems.129 This validates me, and I wish it happened more often.130 — Peter Watts

God did not ordain that the church should drift aimlessly in the seas of uncertainty without compass, captain, or crew. — Billy Graham

I think I'm gonna attach myself to the sinking ship that is book publishing. — Daniel Clowes

Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

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

I have a sense of being at peace. I understand when you give the sign of peace, and when the priest says, 'Peace be with you,' in a way I never did 10 or 15 years ago. I have a deep personal sense of what that means. — Newt Gingrich

While I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw;
For I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being....And I saw that it was holy — Black Elk