Peter Watts

Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.

People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.

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.

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.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.

Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worst than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing

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.