02UndatedIf the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from DilbertPeter Watts / quote ↗
03UndatedRumors 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, they'd 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.Peter Watts / quote ↗
04UndatedReality 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.Peter Watts / quote ↗
05UndatedI 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.Peter Watts / quote ↗
06UndatedAfter four thousand years we can’t even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer.Peter Watts / quote ↗
07UndatedThe most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.Peter Watts / quote ↗
08UndatedYou ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?Peter Watts / quote ↗
09UndatedWhile 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 isn't more trouble than it's worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they're 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 we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct?" Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The biggest boys on the block at any given time aren't necessarily the fittest, or the most efficient, and the game isn't over. The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death. And so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost.Peter Watts / quote ↗
10UndatedThe neurological condition of echopraxia is to autonomy as blindsight is to consciousness.Peter Watts / quote ↗
11UndatedImagine 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. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.You'd 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 hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're 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.Peter Watts / quote ↗
12UndatedYou can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.Peter Watts / quote ↗
13UndatedSo much anger in here. So much hate. So much to take out on someone. This time it's going to count. She's adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, three hundred kilometers from land. She's alone. She has nothing to eat. It doesn't matter. None of it matters. She's alive; that alone gives her the upper hand.Peter Watts / quote ↗
14UndatedThanks to a vampire and a boatload of freaks and an invading alien horde, I’m Human again.Peter Watts / quote ↗
16UndatedBut then I remembered: the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really nowhere else to go.Peter Watts / quote ↗
17UndatedThere'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.Peter Watts / quote ↗
18UndatedIt’s kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.Peter Watts / quote ↗
19UndatedNine 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.Peter Watts / quote ↗
21UndatedYou said it was colorful. What changed?""I don't know. Maybe nothing. I just— I don't actually remember the dreams when I wake up any more.""So how do you know you still have them?" Pag asked.Fuck it I thought, and tipped back the last of my pint in a single gulp. "I know.""How?"I frowned, taken aback. I had to think for a few moments before I remembered."I wake up smiling," I said.Peter Watts / quote ↗
22UndatedStars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life meunderstand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.Peter Watts / quote ↗
24UndatedLike to hear a vampire folk tale?" Sarasti asked."Vampires have folk tales?"He took it for a yes. "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.Peter Watts / quote ↗
