Echopraxia Quotes

“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“A neuron didn’t know whether it fired in response to a scent or a symphony. Brain cells weren’t intelligent; only brains were. And brain cells weren’t even the lower limit. The origins of thought were buried so deep they predated multicellular life itself: neurotransmitters in choanoflagellates, potassium ion gates in Monosiga. I am a colony of microbes talking to itself, Brüks reflected.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“Most people seem to think that organisms develop adaptive traits in response to environmental change. This is bullshit. The environment changes and those who already happen to have newly adaptive traits don’t get wiped out.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“I 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, Echopraxia

“We climbed this hill. Each step up we could see farther, so of course we kept going. Now we’re at the top. Science has been at the top for a few centuries now. And we look out across the plain and we see this other tribe dancing around above the clouds, even higher than we are. Maybe it’s a mirage, maybe it’s a trick. Or maybe they just climbed a higher peak we can’t see because the clouds are blocking the view. So we head off to find out—but every step takes us downhill. No matter what direction we head, we can’t move off our peak without losing our vantage point. So we climb back up again. We’re trapped on a local maximum. But what if there is a higher peak out there, way across the plain? The only way to get there is to bite the bullet, come down off our foothill and trudge along the riverbed until we finally start going uphill again. And it’s only then you realize: Hey, this mountain reaches way higher than that foothill we were on before, and we can see so much better from up here. But you can’t get there unless you leave behind all the tools that made you so successful in the first place. You have to take that first step downhill.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“People put a lot less effort into picking apart evidence that confirms what they already believe.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“you gotta let go of this whole self thing. Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“All science ever did was measure a teensy sliver of the universe and assume that everything else behaved the same way.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“Let’s just agree that neither side has a monopoly on assholes. The point is, once you recognize that every human model of reality is fundamentally unreal, then it all just comes down to which one works best.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“They know God exists already that’s old. I think now they’re trying to figure what to do with It.” “What to do with God.” “Maybe worship. Maybe disinfect.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“A neuron didn’t know whether it fired in response to a scent or a symphony. Brain cells weren’t intelligent; only brains were.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“The neurological condition of echopraxia is to autonomy as blindsight is to consciousness.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“Planck length and Planck time had always looked a bit too much like pixel dimensions for comfort.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“Reality 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, Echopraxia

“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 to point out that exactly the same sort of conflict—the impulse to withdraw one’s hand from a painful stimulus, versus the knowledge that you’ll die if you act on that impulse—was exactly how the Bene Gesserit assessed whether Paul Atreides qualified as “Human” during their gom jabbar test in Frank Herbert’s Dune.)”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“ALL ANIMALS ARE UNDER STRINGENT SELECTION PRESSURE TO BE AS STUPID AS THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH. —PETE RICHERSON AND ROBERT BOYD”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“THE INTUITIVE MIND IS A SACRED GIFT AND THE RATIONAL MIND IS A FAITHFUL SERVANT. WE HAVE CREATED A SOCIETY THAT HONORS THE SERVANT AND HAS FORGOTTEN THE GIFT.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“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.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“At least with the Catholics, you know that when someone hands you a cracker there’s gonna be wine in the mix at some point.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“It’s kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“Transcendence is transformation.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“Everyone’s running from something.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“Why’s a sticky word, though. It’s not especially productive to think of them as agents with agendas. Better to think of them as—as very complex interacting systems, just doing what systems do. Whatever the reagents tell themselves to explain their role in the reaction, it’s not likely to have much to do with the actual chemistry.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“IF YOU ARE GIVEN A CHOICE, YOU BELIEVE YOU HAVE ACTED FREELY.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“Brüks had never been entirely clear on what an omniscient being would need a computer for. Computation, after all, implied a problem not yet solved, insights not yet achieved. There was really only one sort of program for which foreknowledge of the outcome didn’t diminish the point of the exercise, and Brüks had never been able to find any religious orders that described God as a porn addict.)”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger, and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, he thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations—and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty-first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now, we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us. And it came to pass that certain people figured out how to use that.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia