61–70 of 191 posts
Also by Terry Bisson and one of my favorite stories is Bears Discover Fire 1990 https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fi...
Is it me, or is there a subliminal message in the banner of LightSpeed magazine? No time to look into it, but there appears to be a changing message that flashes on and off to take the place of the "LIGHTSPEED" graphic in the banner. The only one I caught was "RESIST".
I find it good for a chuckle perhaps but there's nothing profound in here.
As I’ve gotten older, it’s become increasingly hard for me to understand how anyone can read such comical reductionism as enlightenment. We are infinitely complex arrangements of systems built upon systems, from the quantum properties of carbon atoms up through the proteins that make the “meat” we are so glibly reduced to, through the complexities and adaptations of mammalian bodies, up to the fearsome order of the h…
I don't know where you get the claims from "anyone" about "enlightenment". This story is obviously satire. Meaning, it is a lie that tells the truth.
Is it though? What is it satirizing? Is it satirizing the idea of water and carbon based life? How does that tell any truth?
By all accounts the CPUs we've made with ridiculous stuff like 2nm transistors is _surely_ more advanced than neurons, right? We just haven't figured out how to wire them properly :)
Also by Terry Bisson and one of my favorite stories is Bears Discover Fire 1990 https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fi...
Is it me, or is there a subliminal message in the banner of LightSpeed magazine? No time to look into it, but there appears to be a changing message that flashes on and off to take the place of the "LIGHTSPEED" graphic in the banner. The only one I caught was "RESIST".
Well, actually, probably not. If you say we're made out of meat, you end up with the hard problem of consciousness. I'm imagining a purple cube in this moment. Is the purple cube made out of meat?
If you put two stones in the ground, they define a line. It goes through the center of mass of both stones and extends towards both sides through the universe.
Now remove the stones.
Does the line stop existing? You can still "see it" in your brain. It could be argued that the line has always been there. That the stones were just a marker. A means for an idea to manifest in the physical word. You could put any two other markers at any point on that line and they would represent the same line.
The idea that "the cube is made out of meat" is akin to saying that "the line is made out of stone". Ideas always exist, their representation in the physical world don't.
Your sense of consciousness is just one of those representations. It is "immortal", just like the line is. In principle it could exist without the physical substrate that is your brain, or in a different substrate. Probably there's a way to encode all of that into a big number.
I think this is where the idea of an "immortal soul" comes from. It is however kind of easy to misinterpret it, especially if one is a mesopotamian sheperd who explains the world with gods and religion.
As I’ve gotten older, it’s become increasingly hard for me to understand how anyone can read such comical reductionism as enlightenment. We are infinitely complex arrangements of systems built upon systems, from the quantum properties of carbon atoms up through the proteins that make the “meat” we are so glibly reduced to, through the complexities and adaptations of mammalian bodies, up to the fearsome order of the h…
"Oh god, you're right! They're all just tiny pieces of rubber and silicon, transistors and circuits all crammed chaotically together! How horrifying!"
As I’ve gotten older, it’s become increasingly hard for me to understand how anyone can read such comical reductionism as enlightenment. We are infinitely complex arrangements of systems built upon systems, from the quantum properties of carbon atoms up through the proteins that make the “meat” we are so glibly reduced to, through the complexities and adaptations of mammalian bodies, up to the fearsome order of the h…
It might be that this alternative cosmic sense of "normal" is not a real thing (meat may prove to be more cosmically normal than machine at the end of the day), but the sense of wonder in response to something as ridiculous as a brain, in its capabilities and its design, is a real feeling that the story is appropriately trying to evoke.
Well, actually, probably not. If you say we're made out of meat, you end up with the hard problem of consciousness. I'm imagining a purple cube in this moment. Is the purple cube made out of meat?
The hard problem of consciousness isn't.
The short film someone made is pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg
Also, funny to see Ben Bailey outside of a taxi cab.