Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. Peter Watts More Quotes by Peter Watts More Quotes From 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. Peter Watts scream speech hurt People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think. Peter Watts feelings people thinking 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. Peter Watts adequate alternatives survival Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it. Peter Watts best-effort kicking powerful What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive? Peter Watts not-knowing differences knowing 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. Peter Watts wizards bridges men The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest. Peter Watts self brain philosophy 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. Peter Watts analysis intelligent wise 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. Peter Watts dancer climbing running But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension. Peter Watts matching equal patterns Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail. Peter Watts teeth details long 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. Peter Watts self doe brain 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. Peter Watts odds heart believe 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. Peter Watts skin-tone fighting skins I really wanted to talk to her. I just couldn't find an algorithm that fit. Peter Watts algorithms fit wanted How do you say 'We come in peace' when the very words are an act of war? Peter Watts war 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. Peter Watts cheerful ends stories 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. Peter Watts police rose reality We are not thinking machines. Peter Watts machines thinking Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz. Peter Watts spheres jazz beautiful
