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They're Made out of Meat

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Re: They're Made out of Meat

#151

Post by jimmaswell »

benaiah wrote: post #134
[deleted] wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Not so, actually - humans are one of the best at endurance walking out of all land animals. Trained humans regularly beat horses at long distance races - there's am annual one held in England, for example. I'd give links but I'm on mobile.

Although ironically the locomotion is apparently not very efficient. I remember a good story where the efficiency of a human was compared to other animals and it was medicore, but on a bicycle it blew the animals out of the water, and it then said a computer was a bicycle for the mind.

http://www.cyclelove.net/2013/03/steve-jobs-on-why-computers...

Re: They're Made out of Meat

#152

Post by jimmaswell »

deanjones wrote: post #149

This story was used by Stephen Pinker in "How the Mind Works" as part of an attempt to reject the validity of Searle's Chinese Room argument against Strong AI. IIRC Pinker's point was that Searle's argument rests on a narrow definition of what it means to "understand", and he used this story to illustrate his argument that a broader view of concepts like "understanding" is required. Personally, I wasn't convinced but…

It should be obvious to anybody who knows a little about physics and programming that it's technically possible to have an accurate-enough physics simulation of the matter and energy in a brain, even if it would require more resources than are available, and therefore strong AI is theoretically possible, right? Unless someone believes a human brain requires some supernatural component that operates outsode of the known laws of physics, in which case there's no point discussing the matter with them. Otherwise I don't see how that argument could be legitimately refuted.

Re: They're Made out of Meat

#153

Post by lotsofmangos »

pdpi wrote: post #53
coldtea wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea I had, before the end of the story, was that the aliens were electronic (robots with AI). Perhaps their far back robot ancestors made by an ancient "meat" civilization, but them having forgotten all of that after millions of years... > Meat is a term used to denote food, not a life form type. Actually meat just means meat. It's not just a word for a food, it's a specific kind of organic "substance".

> Actually meat just means meat. It's not just a word for a food, it's a specific kind of organic "substance". Unless it refers to food, you'd usually see the word "flesh" instead of "meat". Or, depending on how specific you were being "muscle tissue", or "fatty tissue".

'Meat' in this sense is already a sci-fi trope.

The ship Grey Area, aka Meatfucker, from Ian Banks books has already been mentioned and the term meat is often used by the A.I. ships.

Meatspace is commonly used as an antonym to cyberspace and in Gibson's neuromancer trilogy, Molly used to be a meat-puppet and Case feels trapped in the meat.

You may not like this usage, but it has been well established for decades now.

Re: They're Made out of Meat

#154

Post by jimmaswell »

emmen wrote: post #10
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #7

Could any life travel faster than the speed of light? (Including digital life.) Do we know much about dark matter yet? Could it travel faster than light, or is it bound by the same rules as normal matter?

Barring significant new physics, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. And that's really a very probably no - although you see popular science stuff written like it can solve the problem, it doesn't, and we have no real expectation that anything will. Dark matter, if it is matter (and there are good but not totally confirmed reasons to think it is) is just that...matter. It would really be not that speci…

I've heard of the possibility of "apparent" FTL through worm holes or other disturbances in spacetime, what do you think of those

Re: They're Made out of Meat

#155

Post by jimmaswell »

kps wrote: post #131
praptak wrote: post #5

It might look like they're conscious but in fact it's only their actions that closely resemble those of conscious beings. The actions are obviously fully automatic because how could meat be conscious?

If you had a piece of meat than consumed English words and excreted correctly translated Chinese, could it be said that the meat actually understands Chinese?

How complex does a system of algorithms have to be to "understand" something? Hard question.

Re: They're Made out of Meat

#156

Post by jdietrich »

Zikes wrote: post #81

This reminds me of a proposition put forth once (I think on tumblr of all places) that while humans are normally considered a "baseline" species in sci-fi, what would a sci-fi universe look like where humans were the superbeings? There were dozens of replies along the lines of: "I heard humans can survive losing a limb! Or even multiple limbs!" "Their strength and tolerance for gravity far exceeds our own!" "When one…

An interesting piece by the YouTuber Tom Scott, based on the conceit that humans are unique in having evolved through competitive natural selection:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcPqk-O-fD4

Re: They're Made out of Meat

#157

Post by gabriel34 »

benaiah wrote: post #134
[deleted] wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Not so, actually - humans are one of the best at endurance walking out of all land animals. Trained humans regularly beat horses at long distance races - there's am annual one held in England, for example. I'd give links but I'm on mobile.

usually humans beat horses on high temperatures and vice-versa (we being better at getting rid of heat).

I would like to know if these races allow for rehydration for both species, if humans run barefeet and if horses run with no cargo/horseshoes.

Re: They're Made out of Meat

#158

Post by pedrosorio »

romaniv wrote: post #85

Is there any point toposting this aside from smug reassertion of the local hivemind's belief in equality of humans an hypothetical thinking machines? Because I don't see any insightful reasoning in this piece aside from simple reversal, which is only convincing if you already a believer. The reality is that we don't know how minds really work and we don't have thinking machines. The belief that the limited knowledge…

Where does the story talk about "machines"? Or when you say "thinking machines" you really mean "thinking lifeforms whose physical cognition center is not meat-based"?

Re: They're Made out of Meat

#159

Post by ctdonath »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #7

Could any life travel faster than the speed of light? (Including digital life.) Do we know much about dark matter yet? Could it travel faster than light, or is it bound by the same rules as normal matter?

Random thought: if, as we're concluding, it's information that cannot travel FTL, maybe "dark matter" is matter which information cannot adhere to (completely fungible: you absolutely cannot discern the difference between one piece and another), allowing FTL movement because you can't discern "it was here, and now it's there, so d/t > c" because you can't differentiate "it" from another "it".
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