Peter Watts Quotes

20 quotes in 378 categories

• Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it.
• 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…
• Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures…
• 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…
• But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension.
• What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?
• What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?
• It’s not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion.
• 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.
• If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert
• 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.…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.
• I really wanted to talk to her. I just couldn't find an algorithm that fit.
• Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.
• How do you say 'We come in peace' when the very words are an act of war?
• People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.
• 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…
• 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…

Browse Peter Watts Quotes by Category