Peter Watts famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#Believe #Heart #Odds
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.
-- Peter Watts

#Cheerful #Stories #Ends
Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it.
-- Peter Watts

#Powerful #Effort #Kicking
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.
-- Peter Watts

#Survival #Alternatives #Adequate
Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of a manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.
-- Peter Watts

#Running #Climbing #Dancer
What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?
-- Peter Watts

#Differences #Knowing #Not Knowing
What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?
-- Peter Watts

#Sunset #Survival #Obsessing
Itâ€™s not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion.
-- Peter Watts

#Lions #Lambs #Mourn
The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.
-- Peter Watts

#Philosophy #Self #Brain
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

#Self #Brain #Doe
Property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.
-- Peter Watts

#Damage #Murder #Easier
Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.
-- Peter Watts

#Long #Details #Teeth
Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz.
-- Peter Watts

#Beautiful #Spheres #Jazz
We are not thinking machines...
-- Peter Watts

#Thinking #Machines
But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension.
-- Peter Watts

#Patterns #Matching #Equal
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

#Reality #Rose #Police
Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiquÃ©s assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith.
-- Peter Watts

#Wise #Intelligent #Answers
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.
-- Peter Watts

#Stars #Sky #Black
I really wanted to talk to her. I just couldn't find an algorithm that fit.
-- Peter Watts

#Algorithms #Fit #Wanted
Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.
-- Peter Watts

#Brain #Survival
How do you say 'We come in peace' when the very words are an act of war?
-- Peter Watts

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

#Thinking #People #Feelings
Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hard-wired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other - deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway.
-- Peter Watts

#Circles #Axes #Perfect
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

#Hurt #Speech #Scream
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

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

#Boss #Brain #Dilbert
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

#Fighting #Skins #Limited Resources

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