Quotes by Peter Watts

Whats the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?

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

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, theyd 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.

Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which cant rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldnt it be here by now?Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didnt have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, theyre not just going to be smart. Theyre going to be mean.It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasnt merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for.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. 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 which poses no threat?Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others werent content until they had ended nature itself, still others until theyd built cities in space.We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment.But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they dont, and once conquered—or adapted to— they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one.And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those whove 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?

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.

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 little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.

After four thousand years we can’t even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer.

The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.

Centuries of navel-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster.I explored it all.Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Nirretranders said it was a fraud; Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger wouldnt even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldnt explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: no system can fully understand itself.Not even the synthesists had been able to rotate it down. The load-bearing beams just couldnt take the strain.All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those theories, all those drugdreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for. None needed: obviously, consciousness makes us what we are. It lets us see the beauty and the ugliness. It elevates us into the exalted realm of the spiritual. Oh, a few outsiders—Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who barely achieved obscurity—wondered briefly at the why of it: why not soft computers, and no more? Why should nonsentient systems be inherently inferior? But they never really raised their voices above the crowd. The value of what we are was too trivially self-evident to ever call into serious question.Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?What a stupid fucking question. I could have answered it in a second, if Sarasti hadnt forced me to understand it first.

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

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 isnt more trouble than its worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And theyre 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 were so unfit, why havent we gone extinct? Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The biggest boys on the block at any given time arent necessarily the fittest, or the most efficient, and the game isnt over. The game is never over; theres no finish line this side of heat death. And so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who havent yet lost.

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

Imagine you are Siri Keeton:You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. Youre a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.Youd scream if you had the breath.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 hadnt done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. Theyre 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.

You can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.

So much anger in here. So much hate. So much to take out on someone. This time its going to count. Shes adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, three hundred kilometers from land. Shes alone. She has nothing to eat. It doesnt matter. None of it matters. Shes alive; that alone gives her the upper hand.

Thanks to a vampire and a boatload of freaks and an invading alien horde, I’m Human again.

The static’s nice. I could do without the screechi

But then I remembered: the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really nowhere else to go.

Theres no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesnt matter whether a solutions optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative.

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