Best 73 quotes of Peter Watts on MyQuotes

Peter Watts

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    Peter Watts

    Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz.

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    Peter Watts

    But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension.

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    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.

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    Peter Watts

    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 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.

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    Peter Watts

    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Peter Watts

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

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    Peter Watts

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

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    Peter Watts

    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.

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    Peter Watts

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

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    Peter Watts

    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.

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    Peter Watts

    Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.

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    Peter Watts

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

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    Peter Watts

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

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    Peter Watts

    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.

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    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.

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    Peter Watts

    We are not thinking machines.

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    Peter Watts

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

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    Peter Watts

    What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?

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    Peter Watts

    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.

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    Peter Watts

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

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    Peter Watts

    All science ever did was measure a teensy sliver of the universe and assume that everything else behaved the same way.

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    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.

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    Peter Watts

    A whole planet of worlds, and not one of them—not one—has a soul. They wander through their lives separate and alone, unable even to communicate except through grunts and tokens: as if the essence of a sunset or a supernova could ever be contained in some string of phonemes, a few linear scratches of black on white. They've never known communion, can aspire to nothing but dissolution. The paradox of their biology is astonishing, yes; but the scale of their loneliness, the futility of these lives, overwhelms me.

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    Peter Watts

    Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions can be just as blinding.

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    Peter Watts

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

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    Peter Watts

    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 wouldn't even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't 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 couldn't 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 hadn't forced me to understand it first.

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    Peter Watts

    Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat.

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    Peter Watts

    Even God can’t plan for everything. Too many variables.

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    Peter Watts

    Everyone’s running from something.

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    Peter Watts

    Everything’s an act. Everything’s strategy.

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    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.

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    Peter Watts

    How is an elephant like a schizophrenic?” “I – what?” “An elephant never forgets.” He said nothing. “That’s an AI joke,” she said after a while.

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    Peter Watts

    I do cry now and then, in case you're wondering. I even cried for Chimp once. I was there for his birth, years before we ever shipped out. I saw the lights come on, listened as he found his voice, watched him learn to tell Sunday from Kai from Ishmael. He was such a fast learner, such an eager one; back then, barely out of my own accelerated adolescence and not yet bound for the stars, I felt sure he'd streak straight into godhood while we stood mired in flesh and blood. He seemed so happy, devoured every benchmark, met every challenge, anticipated each new one with a kind of hardwired enthusiasm I could only describe as voracious.

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    Peter Watts

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    Peter Watts

    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.

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    Peter Watts

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

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    Peter Watts

    Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it... Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents. Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step.

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    Peter Watts

    I think I’ll call you Cygnus,” Chelsea said. “The swan?” I said. A bit precious, but it could have been worse. She shook her head. “Black hole. Cygnus X-1.

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    Peter Watts

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

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    Peter Watts

    It’s really kind of… well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know ‘em. We’re all beautiful.

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    Peter Watts

    It was machines that scanned the heavens, machines that probed the space between atoms, machines that asked the questions and designed to experiments to answer them. All that was left for mere meat, apparently, was navel-gazing.

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    Peter Watts

    I visited blathernodes, soaked myself in other people's opinions.

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    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.

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    Peter Watts

    Mind out of the gutter, Suze. Eros is only one kind of love, eh? Ancient Greeks recognised four.

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    Peter Watts

    Nine days after Perreault first saw the woman in black, an Indonesian mother of four came out of her tent long enough to claim that the mermaid had risen, fully-formed, from the very center of the quake. One of her boys, hearing this, said that he'd heard it was the other way around.