Firefall Quotes

“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, Firefall

“The strident emotional belief that children made you happy, even when all the data pointed to misery. The high-amplitude fear of sharks and dark-skinned snipers who would never kill you; indifference to all the toxins and pesticides that could. The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision—and should some brain-lesioned mother abandon her baby in a burning house in order to save two strangers from the same fire, the rest of the world would be more likely to call her a monster than laud the rationality of her lifeboat ethics. 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. Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart. Fossil feelings. Better off without them, once you’d outgrown the savanna and decided that Truth mattered after all. But Humanity wasn’t defined by arms and legs and upright posture. Humanity had evolved at the synapse as well as at the opposable thumb—and those misleading gut feelings were the very groundwork on which the whole damn clade had been built. Capuchins felt empathy. Chimps had an innate sense of fair play. You could look into the eyes of any cat or dog and see a connection there, a legacy of common subroutines and shared emotions.”
― Peter Watts, Firefall

“The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest.”
― Peter Watts, Firefall

“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, Firefall

“Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other. But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you.”
― Peter Watts, Firefall

“Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain. You’re already a different person than you were ten minutes ago.”
― Peter Watts, Firefall

“Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Space ship? Of course. Were they built by naturally-evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?" I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. "You know what I mean." "It's a meaningless question. Get your head out of the Twentieth Century.”
― Peter Watts, Firefall

“To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were.”
― Peter Watts, Firefall

“You have a naïve understanding of evolutionary processes. There's no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe.”
― Peter Watts, Firefall

“Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions”
― Peter Watts, Firefall

“Hinduism’s predicated on the Self as illusion: no NMRs a thousand years ago, no voxel readers. No evidence. And damned if I can see the adaptive advantage of not believing in your own existence; but neurologically it happens to be true.”
― Peter Watts, Firefall: SHORTLISTED FOR THE HUGO AND LOCUS AWARDS

“To Himself Everyone Is Immortal; He May Know That He Is Going To Die, But He Can Never Know That He Is Dead. —Samuel Butler”
― Peter Watts, Firefall: SHORTLISTED FOR THE HUGO AND LOCUS AWARDS

“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, Firefall

“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”
― Peter Watts, Firefall

“Alter carried baggage over a century old, ConSensus told me. Sascha was right; there'd been a time when MCC was MPD, a Disorder rather than a Complex, and it had never been induced deliberately. According to the experts of that time, multiple personalities arose spontaneously from unimaginable cauldrons of abuse—fragmentary personae offered up to suffer rapes and beatings while the child behind took to some unknowable sanctuary in the folds of the brain. It was both survival strategy and ritual self-sacrifice: powerless souls hacking themselves to pieces, offering up quivering chunks of self in the desperate hope that the vengeful gods called Mom or Dad might not be insatiable. None of it had been real, as it turned out. Or at least, none of it had been confirmed. The experts”
― Peter Watts, Firefall

“of the day had been little more than witch doctors dancing through improvised rituals: meandering free-form interviews full of leading questions and nonverbal cues, scavenger hunts through regurgitated childhoods. Sometimes a shot of lithium or haloperidol when the beads and rattles didn't work. The technology to map minds was barely off the ground; the technology to edit them was years away. So the therapists and psychiatrists poked at their victims and invented names for things they didn't understand, and argued over the shrines of Freud and Klein and the old Astrologers. Doing their very best to sound like practitioners of Science.”
― Peter Watts, Firefall

“Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force on 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, Firefall

“Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions can be just as blinding,”
― Peter Watts, Firefall

“hyperbolic discounting, and,”
― Peter Watts, Firefall

“Semmelweis reflex. They”
― Peter Watts, Firefall

“cellular machinery at”
― Peter Watts, Firefall