Peter Watts
Quote
Centuries of navel-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster. I explored it all. Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Nirretranders said it was a fraud; Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger wouldn't even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: no system can fully understand itself. Not even the synthesists had been able to rotate it down. The load-bearing beams just couldn't take the strain. All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those theories, all those drugdreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for. None needed: obviously, consciousness makes us what we are. It lets us see the beauty and the ugliness. It elevates us into the exalted realm of the spiritual. Oh, a few outsiders — Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who barely achieved obscurity — wondered briefly at the why of it: why not soft computers, and no more? Why should nonsentient systems be inherently inferior? But they never really raised their voices above the crowd. The value of what we are was too trivially self-evident to ever call into serious question. Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? What a stupid fucking question. I could have answered it in a second, if Sarasti hadn't forced me to understand it first.
Related Quotes
Similar Crossword Answers
| Answer | Clues |
|---|---|
| WAR | 809 clues |
| DRAMA | 454 clues |
| SELF | 425 clues |
| GOD | 420 clues |
| GRACE | 368 clues |
| OFFICIAL | 94 clues |
| PTSD | 84 clues |
| CHRIST | 49 clues |
| PEKING | 43 clues |
| HOLINESS | 38 clues |
| CONSCIOUSNESS | 19 clues |
| SUBJECTIVITY | 5 clues |
| CHRISTIANITY | 3 clues |
Similar crossword clues
- Peter ___ Hayes 72.73%
- Peter's status. 72.00%
- Peter out 70.00%
- Peter Pan 70.00%
- Peter the ___ 70.00%
- Peter ... / Rabbit ... 69.57%
- Ampère or Watts 69.23%
- Previn or Watts 69.23%
- Pianist Watts 66.67%
- Peter ___, cartoonist. 66.67%
- Peter and others. 66.67%
- Actress Watts 66.67%
- Philosopher Watts 64.29%
- Peter of cartoons 64.29%
- "Peter Pan" critter 64.29%
- Hymn writer Watts 64.29%
- Prefix with "watts" 64.29%
- Campbell or Watts 64.29%
- Relative of watts. 64.29%
- Peter or James 64.00%
Related word tools
Archaic object pronoun
?
T
?
H
?
E
?
E
Hint 1 meaning
The objective case of thou. See Thou.
Hint 2 anagram
TEEH
Hint 3 another clue
BEING USED OR WORKED FOR THE FIRST TIME
7 +1