162 Quotes by Peter Watts

I was trying to get a handle on Blindsight; I entertained and discarded any number of adaptive functions in search of that grand thematic punchline that would end the book. Yes, my protagonist would realize, self-awareness is absolutely essential because of X. The problem was, I couldn’t find an X that stood up under scrutiny; and it took me far too long to realize that Consciousness is good for nothing at all was the scariest and most existentially gut-churning punchline imaginable.

Nobody gets a good view of a system from the inside, no matter who they are. The view’s distorted.

Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological – but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing. You can’t imagine such a being, can you? The term being doesn’t even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you can’t quite put your finger on.

She spun a hundred-eighty degrees at the end of the passageway, landed like an acrobat beside the drum hatch. “The reason. Why something would attack us even if we didn’t have anything it wanted.” I read it off her: “If it wasn’t attacking at all. If it was defending itself.

I’ve told you before, Daniel: roach isn’t an insult. We’re the ones still standing after the mammals build their nukes, we’re the ones with the stripped-down OS’s so damned simple they work under almost any circumstances. We’re the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.

I know this hasn’t been a seamless narrative. I’ve had to shatter the story and string its fragments out along a death lasting decades.

Good parasites are invisible; the best are indispensable. Gut bacteria, chloroplasts, mitochondria: all parasites, once.

This is it. The final conscious experience. Enjoy it while it lasts.

They never experience the past tense. It’s just another thread to them. They don’t remember stuff, they relive it.