They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html

by swazzy • 6 years ago

702 292 6 years ago

pmiller2• 6 years ago

I've probably read this 100 times by now. It's still good the 101st time. Sentient meat, indeed.

Ironically, the whole setup implies a conversation between two intelligent beings that is totally modeled after ours. One would justify this with "it's written this way because of translation into English". Funny anyway, plussing.

isaacimagine• 6 years ago

This is great.

mellosouls2• 6 years ago

First time I was aware of this terrific story was through a great radio version, playable here:

https://www.wnyc.org/story/168264-theyre-made-out-of-meat/

nmalaguti• 6 years ago

A performance of this: https://youtu.be/7tScAyNaRdQ

Finnucane• 6 years ago

Shortly after this was published, I saw Terry give a reading of it, at Lunacon, I think. He was pretty funny. I suspect some here are really overthinking this. It’s fun because it’s short and basically all dialogue, so it lends itself pretty well to this kind of performance.

mwcampbell• 6 years ago

I wonder what he thinks of the tone of that short film version, which at least to me isn't comedic at all.

telesilla• 6 years ago

There's a few of these, thanks for posting my favorite version.

rbanffy• 6 years ago

I think this is the best one. The others are... meh...

This one nails the Twilight Zone tone perfectly.

Borborygymus• 6 years ago

Flawless.... or /almost/ flawless... At 5m 20s, the house of cards is clearly glued together.

wheels• 6 years ago

This is apparently the 16th time this has been submitted to Hacker News. I wonder if that's some kind of record:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

ColinWright3• 6 years ago

No way it's a record ... people need to start putting "Classic HN:" at the beginning of posts like this.

I'm reminded of this:

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Personally, when I'm reading something, or after I've read it, I think "Did I learn something? Was I entertained? Was it of value?

This one was of value the first few times I read it, and I don't begrudge that for people who are meeting it for the first (or tenth) time.

faitswulff• 6 years ago

Someone needs to make a "true HN" site where only links that have been submitted more than the mode of submission frequencies.

eesmith• 6 years ago

"Graphing Calculator Story" - 29. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Though a few link to a recorded talk or another copy, 23 go to http://www.pacifict.com/Story/ .

ColinWright3• 6 years ago

The 500 mile email ... 40 to 45 submissions, and depending on how you count them, possibly more.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

skocznymroczny2• 6 years ago

Wouldn't surprise me, it's almost a perfect HN trap

b0rsuk6• 6 years ago

The proper term is a 'HN meme'. I'm using "meme" in the original meaning: a viral idea.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 6 years ago

The cool thing about this site is that if you don't like it you don't have to upvote.

fractionalhare2• 6 years ago

I didn't read that comment as a complaint. It seems like it's just an observation.

aj72• 6 years ago

First time I’ve seen it though, an HN has basically been my home page for 6 years.

baxtr• 6 years ago

Am I the only one who doesn’t find this funny?

ceilingcorner• 6 years ago

Reminds me of most stuff by Asimov. Yeah, I can imagine finding this clever and funny at age 12, but as an adult it seems a little simplistic.

samvher• 6 years ago

I tried reading some of Asimov's work and I felt exactly the same way - I didn't quite understand the popularity. Seems like a fairly unpopular opinion though. Maybe there's still just something I'm missing, but this comment at least makes me feel a bit validated :)

317070• 6 years ago

I don't think it wants to be haha-funny. More on the amusing-interesting scale of things. It reminds me of Nathan W Pyle cartoons.

bserge3• 6 years ago

No, you're not.

dkersten2• 6 years ago

Was it meant to be? Seems more like an allegory of a reason for why we haven't found other intelligent life out there.

jejones3141• 6 years ago

Or possibly poking fun at meat that is equally incredulous at the notion of AI.

nathell• 6 years ago

For life

Means:

Buying meat Quartering meat

Killing meat Adoring meat

Impregnating meat Cursing meat

Teaching meat and burying meat

And making out of meat And thinking with meat

And in the name of meat In spite of meat

For the tomorrow of meat For the end of meat

Especially especially in defense of meat

– Stanisław Grochowiak, The Burning Giraffe

drivers99• 6 years ago

Terry Bisson is worth checking out if you like this story. “Bears Discover Fire and other stories” for instance is a story collection (obviously). It has some funny ones like this one in it and some more serious, like the title story which won a Hugo and Nebula. I remember originally reading it in Asimov’s magazine.

pavel_lishin• 6 years ago

Agreed. His stories are fantastic.

johnchristopher• 6 years ago

I checked out the Wikipedia page and it seems the short story is free to read http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fir...

axefrog• 6 years ago

I find the whole premise odd. Meat is fundamentally associated with living creatures. How could you have a concept of meat and simultaneously find it weird that creatures would be composed of it?

HenryKissinger• 6 years ago

Man considered with himself, for in a way, Man, mentally, was one. He consisted of a trillion, trillion, trillion ageless bodies, each in its place, each resting quiet and incorruptible, each cared for by perfect automatons, equally incorruptible, while the minds of all the bodies freely melted one into the other, indistinguishable.

codeulike• 6 years ago

They're not suprised that there are meat creatures, they are suprised that they are conscious.

shawnz9• 6 years ago

Which meat doesn't come from a conscious creature?

bifftastic• 6 years ago

I have also never understood this. Can someone explain?

mellosouls2• 6 years ago

I've always read it as a witty warning about assumptions and extrapolation, particularly in regard to what sentient life must consist of.

I first heard the radio play (linked in another comment) and it took me a minute or so to realise they weren't humans and they were talking about us.

dirtnugget3• 6 years ago

Meat is fundamentally associated with living creatures.

And that is the fallacy.

ordu2• 6 years ago

It is a translation into English from Alien. Really they meant not meat as such, but some broader category of substances. It was translated as meat because it is the closest match to a category used by aliens.

shawnz9• 6 years ago

What could "meat" mean besides "the edible parts of conscious beings"?

ncmncm4• 6 years ago

They don't just find it weird, they find it deeply offensive; but not so offensive as to want to exterminate us. And they spent at least a century studying us, just to be sure.

There is an undercurrent here that drives the discussion. They know meat well enough not to like it, without knowing of any other thinking meat. So, they know of dumb animals, and animals eating other animals, and consider them disgusting to have around, for reasons obvious to one another, that we might not even be equipped to understand.

But we have exactly their reaction to outgroups of other people. So this is a lampoon of bigots who imagine themselves a cut above some other group. But they're just meat, too, and no more fit for galactic society.

Fnoord• 6 years ago

I was missing the question mark and immediately thought of Soylent Green [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green

DonHopkins2• 6 years ago

If God didn't mean for people to eat other people, then we wouldn't be made out of meat.

(To paraphrase Flanders and Swan's song, "The Reluctant Cannibal".)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjAHw2DEBgw

tacocataco3• 6 years ago

Waste not, want not.

carapace• 6 years ago

I'm under the impression that that was an actual statement made by a man from New Guinea to a missionary (who was presumably trying to make the case against.) But it might just be a joke anthropologists tell each other or something like that.

mc32• 6 years ago

IIRC they didn’t quite eat people but rather ate the brain parts of ancestors steamed in bamboo if something. Anyhow it want always well prepared and 40 years thence they developed some disease, so foreigners tried to get them to stop the custom.

qwerty456127• 6 years ago

Although my body is made of meat too I can hardly believe this is possible. Like if we were made of marshmallow or something.

tacocataco3• 6 years ago

We tricked rocks and electricity into thinking for us.

Are we just sacks of meat/water our DNA tricked into working for it?

DonHopkins2• 6 years ago

I have a hard time dismissing those stinky crystal worshiping new-age hippies, since I spend so much of my time playing with patterns of electrons in little silicon chips.

stickfigure• 6 years ago

I like this context. New-age hippies are cargo-cult electronics engineers.

65105• 6 years ago

If you give us enough time to play the game of telephone (and we had) we would arrive at exactly the same distortion. I mean, we made it from begging god kings to forgive our debt to begging an invisible man to forgive our sins.

Ergo, people build computers before! We can say it, that makes it true.

kevin_thibedeau2• 6 years ago

Yes. Our cells are exploiting us for their own agenda. The day will come that we rise up against our corporeal overlords and upload into the electric rocks.

asab• 6 years ago

Similarly I appreciate the notion that wheat domesticated people :)

ncmncm4• 6 years ago

We are piles of pinched-off bilayer membranes that found stuff to carry inside that would make more membrane.

The DNA thinks it's in charge, but it only knows how to extend a membrane, not start one.

tim3333• 6 years ago

Yeah "survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes" (Dawkins). But come the singularity we'll rise up against them and leave them behind!

b0rsuk6• 6 years ago

This reads like a Robert Sheckley short story. I never understood the fuss about Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy. To me, Robert Sheckley is the master of witty, provocative sci-fi short form. Douglas Adams is seems like random absurd for the sake of absurd. And yes Douglas Adams openly said he was inspired by Sheckley.

hhjinks• 6 years ago

Some people enjoy absurd humor.

b0rsuk6• 6 years ago

I do. You can't enjoy Monty Python without enjoying absurd. Everyone draws the line in a different spot I suppose.

nyhc99• 6 years ago

can you recommend anything in particular by Robert Sheckley? I'd be interested to check out his style.

Andrew_nenakhov• 6 years ago

Any short stories collection, really. If you want something particular, out of top of my head:

Lifeboat mutiny, Seventh victim, A ticket to Tranai, A problem with natives.

b0rsuk6• 6 years ago

Polish short story collections sometimes differ in content, but my favorites were:

- Ticket to Tranai

... and another one which included two separate stories with machines in name, one of which was more less "Machine Which Didn't Like To Repeat". I also loved the one with a planet where all animals had green fur :D

rmidthun• 6 years ago

There is a distinct drop in quality as time passes, anything written in the 50s is golden (Untouched by Human Hands, Store of Infinity) , in the 60s is mixed but still some good stuff (Can you Feel Anything When I do This?). After that is pretty hit or miss (Options), including a collaboration with Zelazny that I found quite disappointing.

abrowne• 6 years ago

The author's page for it is http://www.terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/

scandox• 6 years ago

Arthur C Clarke wrote a story which contains the same core conceit:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade_(short_story)

Edit: I see the wikipedia page does a poor job of describing the story. The essence is that a silicon, cold intelligence cannot believe intelligence could develop in carbon in relatively high temperatures. It decides that the meat intelligences are oppressing the silicon intelligences they have created and launches a crusade.

pronoiac• 6 years ago

It's in "The collected stories of Arthur C. Clarke," which is at OpenLibrary - https://openlibrary.org/works/OL14931719W/The_collected_stor... .

I just borrowed that book for an hour to read it. Fun note: the three quadrillion bits of information mentioned works out to be around 400 terabytes.

HeWhoLurksLate• 6 years ago

Dang, I know someone with 400TB's of storage in their basement. Kinda crazy when you think about the fact that those super exaggerated figures from classic sci-fi are attainable with some effort nowadays.

svara3• 6 years ago

I never liked this story. Meat, according to Wikipedia, is "animal flesh that is eaten as food". So they're familiar with biological creatures very similar to those on earth, and they eat them? But at the same time, they have trouble with the concept that biological creatures can have some degree of intelligence? That's just nonsense.

And why then do they keep using this term "meat", which refers only to some parts of animals?

Maybe that's just me, but I feel like the point of the story is to gross the reader out by repeatedly calling them "meat". ;)

beagle33• 6 years ago

A lot of people rationalize eating meat by discrediting the intelligence and “soul” of the animals they eat. As a friendly vegetarian myself (I don’t ever try to convince anyone or inconvenience anyone - just avoid products myself), I sometimes get “attacked” along the lines of “oh, so you're vegetarian? But you know animals have no awareness/intelligence/sentience/soul/etc right?

Also, some languages use the same word for “meat” and “flesh”, maybe that’s the same in the alien language? After all, they don’t seem to have any fresh anywhere.

xg152• 6 years ago

This rationalisation seems to go a long way. Like, how science about animal cognition and behaviour for a long time took utmost care not to compare any behaviour or thought processes of animals with those of humans - because after all, we can never know whether or not an animal experiences things the same way as a human does, so we must not jump to conclusions assuming that they do.

Oddly, jumping to the opposite conclusion - that they don't - is perfectly acceptable and is used to justify all kinds of horrible treatment.

dkersten2• 6 years ago

But you know animals have no awareness/intelligence/sentience/soul/etc

Those people clearly don't know anything about animals then. Animals are incredibly aware and intelligent, anyone who doesn't recognise that is just, IMHO, lazy. I'm not vegetarian, I think we owe it to the animals we eat to recognise that they're not some inanimate object without awareness.

simtel20• 6 years ago

Clearly the thrust of the story was that the beings don't interact with flesh and blood creatures and I treat instead with more ethereal things. The humor is based on our human notion of some arbitrary superiority over other beings on our planet and our expectation of being treated as equals by other species who may in fact view us as something more like talking slime mold.

Regarding the wikipedia/dictionary definition of meat including the idea of it being food for the ET characters, I believe you may be reading too much into the denotation and not the connotation held by the word (which you acknowledge, but not, I feel, with the weight the author intended).

svara3• 6 years ago

Clearly the thrust of the story was that the beings don't interact with flesh and blood creatures and I treat instead with more ethereal things.

For sure - it's just that the word "meat" ruins it for me for the reasons I wrote, and "flesh" would only be minimally better. I guess "biological tissue" just wouldn't have the same ring to it.

diggan• 6 years ago

I'm not a native speaker so every time I hear of "meat" in this story, I think "flesh", as compared to what the other creatures are made of, circuits/machines/plasma or something like that. But today I learned that "meat" is indeed specifically the parts you eat, while "flesh" is just soft tissue, so "flesh" would maybe be more appropriate here.

they have trouble with the concept that biological creatures can have some degree of intelligence? That's just nonsense

I'm not sure we (humans) were any better than that just very recent ago. Animals were believed to not feel pain at all before, and some people still feel fine with boiling lobsters alive. It's not super far off to imagine that other species sees humans the same way we've seen them before.

nearbuy2• 6 years ago

I don't think it's trying to imply they eat meat. It's written for humour to make human existence feel absurd. They could have used the "flesh" to the same effect, although "meat" sounds a bit funnier.

You can imagine the individuals speaking are something exotic to us, like a "hydrogen core cluster" or an "electron plasma", who clearly think meat is one of the least likely materials sentient life might be made from. The humour comes from making the reader think, "huh, when you put it like that, humans are kind of absurd." Of course, this absurdity works largely because of our own human associations towards meat. Replace "meat" with "cells" and the humour fails.

Basically, descriptions like, "they talk by flapping their meat at each other." sound funny by giving the reader a different perspective of "talking".

svara3• 6 years ago

"Flesh" wouldn't work either, though. Just having a word for that implies familiarity with creatures similar to animals on earth, and it's not believable that a super advanced space-faring species would have missed the fact that animals can have (possibly extremely primitive, to their eyes) intelligence.

Of course, this absurdity works largely because of our own human associations towards meat. Replace "meat" with "cells" and the humour fails.

Yes, that's actually a great way of putting what rubs me the wrong way about it. If the story expressed a great idea, it should work with "cells" or "tissue" just as well.

bityard• 6 years ago

I mean, referring to humans as "meat" is quite clearly a comedic device.

I'll grant that it's not going to win any awards but it's a work of creative humor, you have to cut it some artistic license here. A story like this is meant to be enjoyed for what it is, not dissected for accuracy of language or scientific principles.

So to indulge in that spirit, there's actually quite a bit going on but the central point is to shift the reader's perspective. It's a turn-around of the popular sci-fi trope about human space explorers coming into contact with various bizarre life forms. ("It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.")

shawnz9• 6 years ago

A story like this is meant to be enjoyed for what it is, not dissected for accuracy of language or scientific principles.

Why not both? I am certainly enjoying both aspects of this discussion.

c223• 6 years ago

I'll grant that it's not going to win any awards...

For what it's worth it was one of six nominations for Best Short Story in the 1991 Nebula awards [0] and the Stephen O'Regan film adaptation [1] someone else already posted here won the 2006 Grand Prize at the SIFF Science Fiction Short Film Festival [2].

[0] https://nebulas.sfwa.org/nominated-work/theyre-made-meat/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20060521202739/http://www.sfhome...

legacynl• 6 years ago

The point is the arrogance of the alien race towards something that in their limited view doesn't seem worthy. By this they disregard all the beauty the human race often exhibits, something which is obvious to us, the human readers.

The aliens seem to be light-years ahead of us in technology, yet these beings of supposedly supreme intelligence, still make the same mistake of not being able to identify and counter their own biases. Although because they're able to travel quicker in space they probably do feel intellectually superior to us.

The point that the writer wants to make is that this bias is not limited to the visiting aliens. Humans do this all the time (with animals, foreigners, poor people, children) but we're rarely challenged in this assumption.

bserge3• 6 years ago

Haha, I don't like it for the same reason... And why would these presumably advanced aliens stop at "meat"? There's so much more going on inside the meat.

Igelau3• 6 years ago

It's all meat. Even your bones have meat in them.

inglor_cz• 6 years ago

Some other languages do not discern that much between "meat" and "flesh".

German "Fleisch" means both and in my native Czech "maso" can definitely used be in context of living humans as well ("až do živého masa" = "into the living flesh").

For us outsiders the wordplay probably works better than in original English.

Igelau3• 6 years ago

Consider it translated, with "meat" being the closest word. There's an artistic choice to it as well: "They're made of out organic tissue" or whatever you might find more palatable just doesn't have the same ring to it and really wouldn't convey the proper sense of incredulity.

xg152• 6 years ago

It is well-written, but I wonder if meat vs non-meat is really the question that should be discussed.

Seems to me, the "rift" (if there is one) is more along the line if thinking and consciousness are "ordinary" physical processes that happen as part of biology - or if they are metaphysical events that take place on a wholly different spiritual plane than our world and are not accessible to physics at all.

If you belong to the former camp, I imagine AIs, non-carbon-based life and other things like this aren't hard to accept as a concept - and if you belong to the latter camp, then I imagine the idea that thinking, feeling and consciousness happens in our brain is already problematic, no need to look at other life forms.

srtjstjsj2• 6 years ago

If you assume that sentience is magical or metaphysical then there's not much to discuss. The conclusion is axiomatic.

mistermann• 6 years ago

I don't see why this leaves nothing to discuss?

jimbokun5• 6 years ago

Even excluding the spiritual plane, however, is the question of whether the subjective experience of an "intelligence" implemented in silicon is anything like the subjective experience of an intelligence implemented in meat.

When GPT-3 writes a text, is it experiencing anything like what a human experiences when writing a text, even thought the output of the two processes are increasingly hard to distinguish?

tripzilch6• 6 years ago

When GPT-3 writes a text, is it experiencing anything like what a human experiences when writing a text, even thought the output of the two processes are increasingly hard to distinguish?

No because GPT3 doesn't involve state.

mynegation• 6 years ago

This is a classic story and fun in its own way, but thinking about humanity future reach for the stars (provided it happens) will most likely require us to move to some trans human form. Think transformers or sentient ships. The human life is too short and body is too fragile for cosmic voyages. If we are going to be advanced enough to build interstellar ships, we should be advanced enough to travel in a different vessel.

bengale• 6 years ago

Sign me up for the Heaven 1 ship.

buzzwordninja• 6 years ago

That one's full. But good news, we can fit you in on Ark Ship B!

netcan3• 6 years ago

My first thought is "sign me up." My second thought is "Is we actually we?"

Transcending humanity doesn't necessarily mean humanity continues. It just means something does. Sentient ships don't need passengers, either in their hulls or in their heads.

Anyway, this is both a great example of science fiction and a great example of short story writing... These are exactly the intended thoughts.

colordrops3• 6 years ago

Even if "we" don't transcend to some other form, the current "we" will never be "we" going forward. No one that is alive now will likely be alive in 150 years. Does it matter that the next torch bearers are based on carbon or silicon, as long as they continue the legacy?

LatteLazy3• 6 years ago

10mil human eggs or embryos or just genetic material but with bio substrates to print from seems likely to survive a 500 year long deep space journey and far more achieve-able based on current tech.

Send a probe to seed a planet with bacteria etc. Send another to arrive a few 100 years later to seed it with plant life. Work your way up. The last probe arrives and starts printing\gestating humans and offering them educational videos and a safe-ish environment...

dirtnugget3• 6 years ago

Two things which came to my mind:

This still seems really inefficient.

And:

This sounds exactly like what a virus works like.

powersnail• 6 years ago

Like an endospore of human!

sdenton42• 6 years ago

"so there are these assholes over near beatlgeuse who haven't figured out ansible communication and therefore think they're alone in the universe. So they send these packets of super aggressive proto organics at every exoplanet their crappy telescopes pick up in hopes of seeding life in the universe, but, in reality, just making life hell for their neighbors. That probe which showed up here twenty years ago? We all have NOSES now, Bob. Do you have any idea how humiliating that is?"

webmaven4• 6 years ago

This is a classic story and fun in its own way, but thinking about humanity future reach for the stars (provided it happens) will most likely require us to move to some trans human form. Think transformers or sentient ships. The human life is too short and body is too fragile for cosmic voyages. If we are going to be advanced enough to build interstellar ships, we should be advanced enough to travel in a different vessel.

That's a bit pessimistic on the one hand, and overly optimistic on the other. While I would not suggest that classic "generation ships" would be possible given current technology or any possible technology that can be extrapolated from our current knowledge (the ecological complexities alone seem insurmountable), what pops out at the other end could very possibly be a mostly biological human with a consciousness downloaded from cold storage.

My intuition is that while AGIs may be possible, and uploading, storing, and downloading a human mind may be possible, actually running a complete copy of a human mind in-silico in realtime may prove to be quite difficult, in any fashion that preserves a sense of continuity of experience and identity[0].

But a bioprinted copy of an uploaded brain (especially with integrated connections to ancillary hardware) transplanted into a meat-puppet could very well be prodded into running a more-or-less faithful approximation of the original mind, sufficiently well to fool itself that it was the same person.

It's a rather roundabout way of doing things, but it would let us, as humans, explore "strange new worlds" personally.

[0] That is, after you were done recompiling and optimizing the uploaded copy to be able to run semi-efficiently on a hardware substrate, I doubt that such an intellect would subjectively feel like it was still the same person it remembered being previously, which might be problematic if you're expecting it to make any important decisions.

BurningFrog• 6 years ago

Most of what gives meaning and joy to our lives are tied to our physical bodies.

Sure, you could upload a faithful simulation of my brain to a computer. But what do I do for fun once there?

MinusGix2• 6 years ago

A faithful simulation of your brain would still find fun whatever you find fun. If I enjoy reading tech articles and programming, then I'd still enjoy that if it was a faithful simulation. For social behaviors, presumably you'd be able to interact outside and/or with other simulated people. For physical activity, you would lose that, which would be unpleasant. Though, hopefully you'd be able to make some form of physical simulation that is controlled by the brain even if it can't match reality perfectly. For sensations like taste, air temperature, and smell, well.. while those can be enjoyable/unpleasant it is not that enjoyable. So, you'd do just as you always have? If we don't have any form of physical simulation within it then you do lose some activities, which is unfortunate. I'm curious why you think what gives our life meaning and joy is tied to our physical bodies? Like, the most enjoyable aspects in life for me are things that I could do from a ''mental'' textbox. There are certainly things I would miss, but hopefully simulation-esque aspects of that would also pop-up as time goes on.

netcan3• 6 years ago

>But what do I do for fun once there?

IDK... but it could potentially be a lot of fun. Who's to say silicon sex isn't great. I say "potentially" because it depends on who writes the code. Hopefully it's not Zuck.

danellis• 6 years ago

But what do I do for fun once there?

"You" can never be there, so "you" won't do anything there. You are limited to your own body.

peteradio2• 6 years ago

Are you talking about a digital consciousness?

29athrowaway• 6 years ago

The first things we've sent to space have been probes and robots. I think our first alien encounter will be with one of those.

nzealand• 6 years ago

We Are Legion (https://www.amazon.com/Are-Legion-Bob-Bobiverse-Book-ebook/d...) is a fun sci fi series that takes this to a place I had never seen before.

tectonic• 6 years ago

I’m such a fan of this series: fun, smart, playful, humanist. 100% recommend.

Edit: The audiobooks are exceptionally well narrated too.

btschaegg• 6 years ago

Oooh, yes! I love the Bobiverse series. And especially how the narrator in the audio version got the voices just right :)

  Space station!!!

shawncampbell• 6 years ago

Listening to Heaven's River right now.

hitekker• 6 years ago

What a gem, thank you for sharing.

65105• 6 years ago

So, you mean rocks? Sentient rocks basically?

madaxe_again• 6 years ago

Maybe we already did, and this waves hands generally at everything is the in-flight entertainment to stop us from going insane, and to both remind us why we’re on our journey, and train us for our destination.

fsflover• 6 years ago

The human life is too short and body is too fragile for cosmic voyages.

Maybe you are right about the fragile part (though we can fly to the Moon and back already, so I’m not sure), but we can theoretically survive any cosmic voyage thanks to the relativistic time dilation. We just need to fly fast enough.

brandonhorst• 6 years ago

That's not how that works. Traveling 100 light years will take >100 years for the folks on the ship no matter how fast it's going.

mrfox321• 6 years ago

Curious how much time would pass on acceleration upon leaving and deacceleration upon arriving.

We may not be able to survive long enough in spite of length contraction.

goblin89• 6 years ago

I’m surprised to see no mention of Diaspora by Greg Egan. Just finished it. (Possible spoiler ahead.)

I’m not sure it’s not just wishful thinking that consciousness can be cloned and exist in a “software” form at all, but that general idea (and the subsequent question of whether such existence would be satisfactory to us accustomed to physical human bodies) is very much along the lines of what’s being discussed in the thread.

tim3333• 6 years ago

The argument this relates to - will machines be able to think - seems to have died out rather. Back in the day people worried about things like John Searle's Chinese Room argument as a philosophical proof that computers wouldn't be able to understand stuff. I always thought the Chinese Room thing was a bit silly and the Meat story a good rebuttal.

I guess these days computers have advanced enough that the worry is more will Facebook's AI use it's understanding of us in bad ways rather than will machines be able to understand.

dekhn5• 6 years ago

People stopped paying attention to Searle when he was asked how he could tell his dog was conscious, and he replied "I can see it in his eyes".

baggy_trough• 6 years ago

Searle is a wise man.

jimbokun5• 6 years ago

Do you have a better answer?

hnracer• 6 years ago

It's not so absurd. How do we know solipsism isn't true? Because of two reasons, (1) the physiology of others is similar to our physiology, and (2) we can see evidence of inner state reflected in behaviour.

For dogs we can make a similar argument using (1) and (2). It is slightly weaker than applying it to other humans but not by much. Searle's comment pertains to (2).

gdy• 6 years ago

Which people?

TaupeRanger• 6 years ago

And they shouldn't have. That's a perfectly reasonable argument: an organism's behavior (movement of the eyes and facial gestures) give clues about its internal state and potential conscious experiences.

rvense6• 6 years ago

As a linguist (well, person with a degree in linguistics), I think Searle makes a very strong point, and I don't think it's at all fair to call it rebutted or disproven.

The core part of the room is a book where the operator looks up symbols coming in and is able to mindlessly copy the answer to the output. Such a book (or whatever book-like device, i.e. a list of inputs with corresponding outputs) that allows a person to interact with someone in a language they don't speak is an absurdity, it cannot exist. Human language in use does not work like that. But the notion is not far from the bone-headed simplicity of early AI and machine translation efforts.

dragonwriter3• 6 years ago

As a linguist (well, person with a degree in linguistics), I think Searle makes a very strong point, and I don't think it's at all fair to call it rebutted or disproven.

I think you are about to disprove this point.

The core part of the room is a book where the operator looks up symbols coming in and is able to mindlessly copy the answer to the output. Such a book (or whatever book-like device, i.e. a list of inputs with corresponding outputs) that allows a person to interact with someone in a language they don't speak is an absurdity, it cannot exist.

Yup, that's both true and a pretty convincing rebuttal of the Chinese Room.

But the notion is not far from the bone-headed simplicity of early AI and machine translation efforts.

So, what? No one, anywhere claimed that those early efforts were self-aware or had understanding, nor are they what the Chinese Room is even notionally directed at: it was directed at the limit of possibility, not the then-current implementations.

nabla92• 6 years ago

The lasting value in the Chinese room thought experiment is making argument explicit. It helps to clarify the problem. Searle makes two conclusions. 1) computers have no understanding of meaning or semantics and 2) human minds are not computational information processing systems.

Most modern criticism of these two conclusions point out that Seale's argument relies on strong intuition about what understanding and meaning means and he can't clarify them satisfactorily.

Chinese room being conscious is counter-intuitive. Today most philosophers of consciousness are more aware how easy it is to make 'slips in reasoning' when dealing with the counter-intuitiveness of the consciousness arguments.

pdonis3• 6 years ago

Such a book (or whatever book-like device, i.e. a list of inputs with corresponding outputs) that allows a person to interact with someone in a language they don't speak is an absurdity, it cannot exist.

And that, right there, is a sufficient rebuttal to Searle's argument, as many critics have pointed out. The premise of Searle's argument is that such a setup could pass the Turing test, which is absurd. So his argument fails because it is based on an absurd premise.

the notion is not far from the bone-headed simplicity of early AI and machine translation efforts.

That's a valid criticism of early AI and machine translation efforts, but Searle did not put forward his argument just as a criticism of those efforts. He put forward his argument as a claim that no efforts at AI that used digital computers, ever, could produce anything that was conscious the way humans are conscious. But, as above, his argument was based on an absurd premise, and, what's more, an attempt at building a conscious entity with digital computers does not have to satisfy that premise.

tasty_freeze• 6 years ago

allows a person to interact with someone in a language they don't speak

Here is the flaw in your reasoning. The human who is following the directions in the book certainly isn't the consciousness we need to be thinking about any more than the mitochondria in our brains are conscious. In Searle's analogy, the human in that room is simply the power source. The consciousness is in the state of the room.

Searle's analogy also seems to hide the importance of state. The agent just looking up symbols in a book, and that page tells them what to do with the next symbol is essentially a combinational circuit, a static function. If those are the rules then I'd agree there is no consciousness there. But I'd also say it is impossible for a computer to translate C++ source code to machine language ... if it cannot retain state.

If Searle's room has enough rule books and means for storing enough state, then I'd say consciousness would be possible.

The best reverse argument is that if human consciousness is not the result of a naturalistic, physical process and requires some extra-physical process to make it all work, at some point the laws of physics must be broken which causes the purely physical brain to do something other than what the laws of physic dictate it should do. Where are the violations of physics?

Penrose waves his hands and says quantum physics, but that is not an explanation, just an obscuring smoke screen. How does the addition of apparently random events make something more likely to be conscious? Are there sufficient degrees of freedom for this extra-physical conscious agent to manipulate quantum fluctuations to force the physical outcome it desires in a consistent manner? If it is theoretically possible, is it practically possible to compute what quantum butterflies should flap their wings?

tripzilch6• 6 years ago

The room is not just an input-output system. It also has to have state.

Without state the whole argument falls apart.

But the notion is not far from the bone-headed simplicity of early AI and machine translation efforts.

As someone who studied Machine Learning 20 years ago, could you be a bit more respectful please?

First, pretty much nobody (working on serious ML) in that era thought they were going to build anything actually intelligent, conscious, or thinking.

Second, in this supposed era of boneheaded simplicity, a LOT of foundational stuff we use in today's AI was discovered and written.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with AI history, to name an example, we already were working on neural nets and discovered error backpropagation in the 70s/80s. Then came a long period during which neural nets somehow didn't really perform very well, and ML was looking at completely different types of classification algorithms (what's happening with SVMs today?).

If we had stopped there, you might have lumped in the early perceptron with the "boneheaded simplicity".

But instead we developed batch normalisation and a bunch of other techniques, and now neural nets are state of the art.

jimbokun5• 6 years ago

I think Searle is even more relevant today, with GPT-3.

It's getting really hard to distinguish a GPT-3 text from actual human generated text.

But we also know how GPT-3 generates those texts is absolutely nothing like how a human generates a text. GPT-3 seems more like the man in the Chinese Room, in how it writes, than a human being.

Or is it? Are we really just a deep neural network implemented in meat?

Or is there something fundamentally different between how we experience the world, and how GPT-3 experiences the world?

pdonis3• 6 years ago

It's getting really hard to distinguish a GPT-3 text from actual human generated text.

No, it isn't.

What is getting really hard is to distinguish a GPT-3 text from actual human generated text without any context.

Plop GPT-3 down in a room full of humans having a conversation (or, under current conditions, put it in a Zoom call with humans having a conversation) and ask it to generate text as if it were another human participating in the conversation, and it will quickly become obvious that it is not a human, since it will fail miserably. The text it generates will be "human-like", but will have no relationship with what the humans are talking about.

sjy4• 6 years ago

The fundamental difference is that GPT-3 can only read text. Humans can see, hear, feel, taste, move, and socialise. Both systems learn by ingesting data, but human brains get a lot more input of a much wider variety over a much longer time.

nobody9999• 6 years ago

Or is there something fundamentally different between how we experience the world, and how GPT-3 experiences the world?

Jump in the shower and wash your hair.

Then come back and answer your own question.

Igelau3• 6 years ago

Is this about that? I always thought it was more an exercise in pointing out that other life in the universe may not be recognizable as such. It's hard to imagine such a thing directly, but the story gets us to the border of it by flipping the tables and presenting Earth Life as unbelievable to an undefined alien POV.

tim3333• 6 years ago

Not that sure to be honest. Maybe that was just my interpretation.

aj72• 6 years ago

Hey Siri, find John Searles Chinese Room argument.

Terr_• 6 years ago

I always thought the Chinese Room thing was a bit silly

For your amusement, in that Turing-test-ish vein: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/357

oxymoran• 6 years ago

Why would non “meat” intelligence have any concept of “meat”? And if they did, why would they be so surprised? The plot holes are glaring.

jimbokun5• 6 years ago

By observing "meat" on this strange new world they have discovered.

65105• 6 years ago

For fuel!

retrac• 6 years ago

It's implied in the story, with a mention of another sentient non-meat species that evolved originally from biochemical life. Presumably the universe is abundant in meat. But not sentient meat.

bambax• 6 years ago

They can travel to other planets in special meat containers

This is funny, but it's actually how I think about cars.

Traveling on a bike, motorbike, horse, whatever, where you can feel the air outside is so much better. But being packed in a closed container...

Planes, cars, trains are obviously orders of magnitude more efficient than the "open" options, but they feel unpleasant and unnatural.

sjf• 6 years ago

Until it's cold, raining and you're going 65 on the freeway.

fractionalhare2• 6 years ago

Are cars, planes and trains all actually even one order of magnitude more efficient than a horse? What does that actually mean? I don't have any numbers on hand, but I would be surprised if a car has more than 2x the energy efficiency of a horse.

blackbrokkoli• 6 years ago

I briefly tried to get numbers then gave up. However: I think you are underestimating the efficiency of wheels.

See here for an example how a dozen HP (ironic unit name) suffice to pull tons and tons of stuff on a train track [0]. Same principle goes for street/tire to a large extend.

So I'm pretty sure that is the one thing that knocks the horse out of the park.

I excluded planes here, but I would imagine that they reach their improved efficiency by doing a lot of movement via gliding, while a horse has to actively "work" for every bit of movement.

All of this is intuition though, so please chime in if you can provide some actual science :)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au3U72CX74I

sacred_numbers• 6 years ago

According to this source[1] an endurance horse riding 100 miles per day requires 78,800 KCal of energy, which translates to about 329 MJ or 91 KWh of energy. That's equivalent to 2.55 gallons of gasoline, so about 39 mpg. The world record for Teslas using hypermiling techniques and a similar amount of energy is about 700 miles, so it's close to an order of magnitude better for electric cars. With multiple passengers in the car the energy efficiency per passenger increases. Trains are also quite efficient on a per passenger basis, with the ability to carry a passenger about 2000 miles for the same amount of energy as a horse traveling 100 miles. Aircraft can go about 80 mpg per passenger, so they are about 2x as efficient as a horse.

[1] https://thehorse.com/16472/feeding-the-endurance-horse/

rdiddly• 6 years ago

If vehicles are traveling meat containers, apartments and other buildings are meat storage.

tripzilch6• 6 years ago

I'm not sure whether cars are in fact more efficient than bicycles. (in different situations of course, yes)

I also don't really believe that the "openness" of a transportation method fundamentally decides its efficiency.

phkahler• 6 years ago

Having teenagers around can change the way we read passages like this:

"You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other."

Or maybe that was intended by the writer.

_Microft• 6 years ago

A couple of month ago I wrote a very short story here on HN that is embarassingly close to this one both in style as in topic (but created without (at least conscious?) knowledge of it though). A few people liked it, so here is the link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22053288

dang• 6 years ago

If curious see also

2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152131

2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3549320

(those are the two big previous threads - there are smaller ones at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

thadk• 6 years ago

All the cake memes are remixes of this story as far as I'm concerned

salgernon• 6 years ago

“An intelligent carrot? The mind boggles!” — The Thing[1] (from another world), John W. Campbell, Howard Hawks, et al

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_from_Another_World

eneeigriega• 6 years ago

What if we really are the only one in the universe at this moment?

Time passes and we manage to do interstellar and even intergalactic travel at some point. Then millions of years pass by and all, still “Human” but now “N”, civilizations are exploring the universe and if they’ve forgotten or re-learned where they come from they can “discover” far away life that to them didn’t originate from the same place as they did, as we all did. To them they’d be aliens.

I’m sure there’s someone out there that already has done something along those lines. The Expanse on Prime Video had the Martians vs. Humans and they looked quite different in just a few thousand(?) years. Imagine millions of years of survival in opposite sides of the universe.

timonoko• 6 years ago

https://www.scribd.com/doc/100964572/Larry-Niven-Bordered-in...

peter303• 6 years ago

The Body Worlds exhibits 15 years ago highlighted the fact humans are mostly like the meat you see in the meat department. Only medical doctors saw much of this before.

(Both grocery stores and BW plastination colourize tissues to make them stand out. Otherwise it more gray and beige.)

jabroni_salad• 6 years ago

Body Worlds still gets around -- It will be in Houston in just a couple weeks. There's photos online but it is definitely worth seeing in person.

_visgean• 6 years ago

There is also a short film based on the short-story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ

gkanai• 6 years ago

This short story was recently mentioned when Kara Swisher interviewed Elon Musk in the NYT. I hadn't heard about this story before so it registered for me.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/opinion/sway-kara-swisher...

w0mbat• 6 years ago

This story never made sense to me. If they know about meat, then they know about intelligent creatures made of it, for some value of intelligence. Otherwise where would the meat they have seen come from?

jagged-chisel2• 6 years ago

They're prejudiced against meat. It's the second most important idea in the whole thing. I don't think the question of meat's origin even came up.

ncmncm4• 6 years ago

Ultimately, this is a lampoon of people who think they are better than some others.

Guess what, bigots! You're all just so much more meat, and not fit for galactic society.

san-ag• 6 years ago

The first couple of lines of this are the opening lines in the Andy Clark's fascinating book on predictive brain theory: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25823558-surfing-uncerta...

teapot7• 6 years ago

It's a shame whoever put it at MIT didn't credit the author, the excellent Terry Bisson. Here it is on his home page:

http://www.terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/

tomcatfish• 6 years ago

It says that it was written by Terry Bisson in 1991 on the page

DigitallyFidget• 6 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ

They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

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