Peter Watts Is An Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays

by Peter Watts

Because there’s no denying that pretty much every problem in the biosphere hails from a common cause. Climate change, pollution, habitat loss, the emptying of biodiversity from land sea and air, an extinction rate unparalleled since the last asteroid and the transformation of our homeworld into a planet of weeds—all our fault, of course. There are simply too many of us. Over seven billion already, and we still can’t keep it in our pants.

These neuroscientists smiling at us from the screen—Douglas Cochrane, Juliette Hukin—they know what they’ve got. Maybe they’ve discovered something so horrific about the nature of Humanity that they’re afraid to reveal it, for fear of outrage and widespread panic. That would be cool.

your gut has a mind of its own: a standalone neural net with the computational complexity of a cat brain (no surprise there—cats are basically stomachs sheathed in fur anyway).

Trying to ban government surveillance would be like poking a silverback gorilla with a stick. “But just maybe,” he allowed, “they’ll let us look back.” Dude, thought I, do you have the first fucking clue how silverbacks react to eye contact?

the most basic tenet of empiricism is that any of us could be wrong about anything. “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right,” Einstein once said. “A single experiment can prove me wrong.”

(the similarity to which is apparently deliberate homage rather than blatant rip-off).