https://youtu.be/T6JFTmQCFHg?si=HSwmXF9i5OCZvFVh
The host of cash cab starred in this enactment of this script.
They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
141–150 of 181 posts
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#142weird to remember when universities gave people web pages and let them remain, even after they left. the owner has apparently passed away. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonglobe/name/david-... https://stuff.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/dave/resume.html
Dave was a friend. He was one of the most intellectually curious people I knew. Gone way too soon.
sorry for your loss
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, the story doesn't say that it's machines if I can see correctly. It might just as well be other evolved organisms, just not protein/"meat" based.
Makes you wonder how can they have a concept of "meat", let alone such a dismissive one. We call "meat" the animal tissue that we eat as food- so either here "meat" is an inadequate term for "organic matter", or we have the curious case of an alien lifeform that eats organic matter while not being itself organic. In any case, being non-organic, it's not clear where they might have gained such contemptuous familiarity…
It’s not hard to imagine aliens knowing about organic matter since those are universal. I could see a disdain for it if that’s where they started and then “ascended”. Much like we might view crude stone tools compared to say the LHC. Or how we view a single celled organism.
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes, i agree that it is absurd to expect human corpses or bologna to be self-aware? i have occasionally seen small children make that error
Nice dodge, but I'm referring to the dumb data-structures mimicking sentient human words.
human-written words are not self-aware; they're just inert ink on paper, or the equivalent in other media. i've never seen even a small child make that error before. if you wrote that in earnest, you seem to be suffering from a bad kind of confusion and may need medical attention
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#145Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice dodge, but I'm referring to the dumb data-structures mimicking sentient human words.
human-written words are not self-aware; they're just inert ink on paper, or the equivalent in other media. i've never seen even a small child make that error before. if you wrote that in earnest, you seem to be suffering from a bad kind of confusion and may need medical attention
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Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, the story doesn't say that it's machines if I can see correctly. It might just as well be other evolved organisms, just not protein/"meat" based.
Makes you wonder how can they have a concept of "meat", let alone such a dismissive one. We call "meat" the animal tissue that we eat as food- so either here "meat" is an inadequate term for "organic matter", or we have the curious case of an alien lifeform that eats organic matter while not being itself organic. In any case, being non-organic, it's not clear where they might have gained such contemptuous familiarity…
English has separate terms for "flesh" and "meat" for complicated reasons, with "meat" having a stronger food implication. But I think the story uses "meat" because it's a funnier word in that context.
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#148I like how the word "meat" is clearly an inaccurate translation of a notion in the language of the conversation, for lack of a better word in human languages. "Organic matter" would be more accurate, but less striking. Meaning, "meat" is a variation on the "unreliable narrator" theme: the "unreliable language". This is used a lot in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun , where medieval language describes artifacts of a s…
> Organic matter
By weight we’re mostly made of inorganic molecules.
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, the story doesn't say that it's machines if I can see correctly. It might just as well be other evolved organisms, just not protein/"meat" based.
Makes you wonder how can they have a concept of "meat", let alone such a dismissive one. We call "meat" the animal tissue that we eat as food- so either here "meat" is an inadequate term for "organic matter", or we have the curious case of an alien lifeform that eats organic matter while not being itself organic. In any case, being non-organic, it's not clear where they might have gained such contemptuous familiarity…
> Makes you wonder how can they have a concept of "meat"
Maybe they have encountered organic life before, but since it hadn’t invented radio they didn’t realise it was sapient, or even sentient.
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#150Andy Weir's The Egg is another excellent short story: [1] http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html If you're looking for more short stories, I highly recommend the following: • Ted Chiang's Exhalation • Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life and Others • Ken Liu's Paper Menagerie • Borges's Ficciones • Smullyan's What is the Name of This Book? • Smullyan's Lady or the Tiger? • Douglas Adams's God's Debris Remember t…
They're Made Out of Meat (21 submissions) and The Egg (33 submissions) seem to be the most frequently submitted short stories to this site: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=galactanet.com
I present my fav "The Machine Stops" by EM Forster with 41