“ So 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. Sh… Peter Watts
“ The premise of Ezequiel Morsella’s PRISM model7,8 is that consciousness originally evolved for the delightfully mundane purpose of mediating conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles. (I have… 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, a… Peter Watts
“ The neurological condition of echopraxia is to autonomy as blindsight is to consciousness. 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… Peter Watts
“ Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively. 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 cont… Peter Watts
“ Stars, 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
“ 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 qua… Peter Watts
“ But then I remembered: the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really nowhere else to go. Peter Watts
“ While 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 w… Peter Watts
“ You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once? 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 a… Peter Watts
“ Rumors 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 fu… 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. Peter Watts
