Ray Nayler > Quotes

“The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“We came from the ocean, and we only survive by carrying salt water with us all our lives—in our blood, in our cells. The sea is our true home. This is why we find the shore so calming: we stand where the waves break, like exiles returning home.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“I think what we fear most about finding a mind equal to our own, but of another species, is that they will truly see us—and find us lacking, and turn away from us in disgust. That contact with another mind will puncture our species’ self-satisfied feeling of worth. We will have to confront, finally, what we truly are, and the damage we have done to our home. But that confrontation, perhaps, is the only thing that will save us. The only thing that will allow us to look our short-sightedness, our brutality, and our stupidity in the face, and change.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“And because of that, the smile was like the shadow of your own death. Evrim’s existence implicated yours. It implied you, too, were nothing more than a machine—a swarm of preprogrammed impulses iterating endlessly. If Evrim was a conscious thing, and made, then maybe you were made as well. A construct made of different materials. A skeleton walking around, sheathed in meat, fooled into thinking it has free will. A thing that had occurred by accident. Or a thing made on a whim, to see if it could be done.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“Only those incapable of empathy are truly caged.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“How we see the world matters—but knowing how the world sees us also matters.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“We are embedded in habit. We dread the truly new, the truly emergent. We don’t fear the end of the world—we fear the end of the world as we know it.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“Yes, guilt. It’s a revenge fantasy. We are so ashamed of what we have done as a species that we have made up a monster to destroy ourselves with. We aren’t afraid it will happen: We hope it will. We long for it. Someone needs to make us pay the price for what we have done. Someone needs to take this planet away from us before we destroy it once and for all. And if the robots don’t rise up, if our creations don’t come to life and take the power we have used so badly for so long away from us, who will? What we fear isn’t that AI will destroy us—we fear it won’t. We fear we will continue to degrade life on this planet until we destroy ourselves. And we will have no one to blame for what we have done but ourselves. So we invent this nonsense about conscious AI.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“One of the great tragedies of science is that the increase in its complexity has made most scientists into little more than technicians, driving them into the tunnels of specialized disciplines. The further the scientist progresses down into the mine of knowledge, the less she can see the world into which that knowledge fits.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“Language doesn’t just allow us to describe the world as it exists: It also opens up a world of things that are not here.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“Every animal's perception of the world, constructed by its evolved sensory apparatus and nervous system to take best advantage of its environment, is subjective - there are no colors out there, as we perceive them, waiting for us. There is no sound - only waveforms. And perhaps the strangest fact of all: Outside our bodies, there is no pain. Pain is something we create.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“When I was a child,” Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan said, “I was fascinated by shipwrecks. What could be more interesting than these strange artifacts we create, these unintended consequences of our efforts to cross a medium totally hostile to us? These vessels filled with all our hopes for exploration, trade, war. These ships filled with all the good and evil of our society, being transformed back into nature.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“We came from the ocean, and we only survive by carrying salt water with us all our lives—in our blood, in our cells. The sea is our true home. This is why we find the shore so calming: we stand where the waves break, like exiles returning home. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“But what could be more illusory than the world we see? After all, in the darkness inside our skulls, nothing reaches us. There is no light, no sound—nothing. The brain dwells there alone, in a blackness as total as any cave’s, receiving only translations from outside, fed to it through its sensory apparatus.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“This society—what we call modern society, what we always think of as the most important time the world has ever known, simply because we are in it—is just the sausage made by grinding up history.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“His nervousness smeared the memory the way intoxication would,”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“We cannot wait. We must act immediately, and take the consequences. We must debate their results, and act again. Action cannot be the product of a final conclusion. Action and argument must be bound up together, driving one another forward, each correcting the other’s course. Action and argument together form an experiment, and nothing but constant experimentation will get us where we need to be. The system that contains us is not threatened by what we think of it. It is threatened by what we do about it. And the time for doing is always now.”
― Ray Nayler, Where the Axe Is Buried

“Power was the ability to destroy without needing to. To do it not out of necessity, but as an act of pure excess.”
― Ray Nayler, The Tusks of Extinction

“Someone said that people don’t really want to date other people. They don’t really want equal partnership—you know, two full people in a relationship. Two people with demands and desires and differences of opinion about everything. What they want is one-point-five people in the relationship. They want to be the complete one, the person who controls the relationship—and they want the other person to be half a person. You know, someone who gets them, but who doesn’t have their own demands. Someone who appears complete, with all these personality quirks and their own opinions and stories about the world—but not in an annoying way. Not in a way that would demand you change. So six or seven years ago, this big company in the SF-SD Axis that specializes in AI started cranking these things out. What you do is, you fill out this long questionnaire on your terminal, play a whole bunch of different simulations and puzzle games, and then they custom-produce one for you.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“We are so ashamed of what we have done as a species that we have done as a species that we have made up a monster to destroy ourselves with. We aren’t afraid it will happen: We hope it will. We long for it. Someone needs to to make us pay the price for what we have done. Someone needs to take this planet away from us before we destroy it once and for all. And if the robots don’t rise up, if our creations don’t come to life and take the power we have used so badly for so long away from us who will?What we fear isn’t that AI will destroy us- we fear it won’t.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“you and I having this conversation right now, and anyone reading the magazine, is part of an unbroken chain of communication – an interpretive process, with messages being exchanged millions of times per second, between cells and even organelles within cells, that stretches back, totally unbroken, 3.7 billion years. That’s 3.7 billion years of conversation going on between living structures in order to allow us to be here today. If there had ever been a break, even for a second, you wouldn’t be here. If you were looking for a metaphysical thought to give you a sense of overwhelming wonder, all you need is to meditate for a moment on the fact that you are part of this unbroken exchange, a conversation that goes all the way back to the puddle, or the clay-like substrate, that all life emerged from.”
― Ray Nayler

“Lydia, our daughter, was born a month before I began The Mountain in the Sea. She was four while Where the Axe Is Buried was being written. She has completely changed my outlook on life. My concern for her future is the main driving force behind this book’s creation, and behind all of my writing. I want her to live in a better world than the present one—a world where authoritarian government is the rarest aberration, and the future is something her generation thinks of with excitement and optimism, not dread.”
― Ray Nayler, Where the Axe Is Buried

“Despite everything we have done to the ocean, despite everything we have done to this world, life finds a way.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“All systems collapsed eventually—and if they collapsed, that meant there was space for something better.”
― Ray Nayler, Where the Axe Is Buried

“There is a “real” world, out there, but we do not perceive it directly. It is assembled by the sensory and nervous systems of each individual animal, and it is assembled differently by every one of them. What we perceive is a construct. Every animal’s perception of the world, constructed by its evolved sensory apparatus and nervous system to take best advantage of its environment, is subjective—there are no colors out there, as we perceive them, waiting for us. There is no sound—only waveforms.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“Whoever can remember is real. A being that remembers is alive, and authentic. I am here. That is enough.”
― Ray Nayler, The Tusks of Extinction

“Evolution built advanced minds not once, but at least twice, gifting them not only to mammals and their kin, but also to cephalopods, and especially to the animal at the apex of ocean intelligence: the octopus. These are animals so unlike us that most aliens we imagine in our fantasies about outer space have more in common with humans. But there is no denying their sentience. I believe the first aliens we encounter will rise to greet us from the sea.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“We’re monsters to the Octopuses: hunters, destroyers, killing their relatives and laying waste to their world. And they are monsters to us: their motivations inexplicable, their minds totally alien.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“And I understood: I know what it is like to be from an extraction zone. What it is like to grow up in the place where the taking begins. But an elephant knows what it is like to be an extraction zone. That is their history. The elephant is enormous, but it is not as gigantic as the history of human exploitation.”
― Ray Nayler, The Tusks of Extinction