162 Quotes by Peter Watts

As far as anyone could tell, Portia had learned to partition its cognitive processes: almost as if it were emulating a larger brain piece by piece, saving the results of one module to feed into the next. Slices of intellect, built and demolished one after another. No one would ever know for sure – a rogue synthophage had taken out the world’s Salticids before anyone had gotten around to taking a closer look – but the Icarus slime mold seemed to have taken the same basic idea and run with it.

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

You might just decide that one life lived on your own recognizance is better than a million unremembered births.

What, you stay awake when you exercise? You don’t find it, um, boring?

If you can see it, chances are it doesn’t exist.

How do you know? Maybe you’re just out of the loop, maybe those orthogonal stealthnets are running you the way you think you’re running Rakshi. You think everyone on the planet’s a puppet except for Colonel Jim Moore?

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies.

All this careful conservatism, these shackled environments that barely edged beyond the laws of physics – they only guarded against the Inner Heckler, not these unwelcome sensations intruding from outside.

A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere.