[b]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.[/b]
Now of course we know why.
Don’t we?
People aren’t rational. We’re not thinking machines, we’re - we’re feeling machines that happen to think.
That can’t be good.
Well, if it’s true anyway.
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.
Anyone here know what brought that on?
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.
The adequate? Maybe, but it lacks the cache of the fittest.
I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition— the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe—and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck. To this day, I still don’t know what went wrong.
Hell, it could be any one of many things.
Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of a manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.
My guess: whatever that means.