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They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

mit.edu

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Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#161

Post by adriancr »

shpx wrote: post #96

I've never understood what people see in this story. Meat is a complex organization of trillions of self-replicating machines, each of which (besides red blood cells maybe) is also incredibly complex... much more advanced than anything human minds have been able to build. I can't imagine what a sentient entity would have to be made out of or how much less "efficient" or stable it would have to be than me for me to fi…

Story is a hypothetical answer to why we haven't made contact with other intelligent life.

That xenophobic aliens are choosing to ignore us because of inherent differences.

This is how discrimination would look like if you're on the receiving end without your knowledge.

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#162

Post by atom058 »

utopcell wrote: post #87

"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotation ago, wants to be friendly again." 2 galactic rotations ? That's a long time to keep a grudge. But also fun to think that Earth is only ~20 galactic years old.

We are born meat and die meat; our life spans are short

"Hyrdogen core clusters" might be around a bit longer

On a related note, it would be curious to see how many years a computer could keep chugging along silently doing its job. Of course dependent on a reliable power supply and that We stop our habit of breaking all dependencies every three months. Maybe thousands of years would be possible? A bit interesting to think about.

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#163

Post by john-radio »

shawnz wrote: post #50
delecti wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily I thought almost the opposite. I feel like "meat" is deliberately chosen in-character to be both less precise and less respectful than "organic matter". It would be like a species with organic computers incredulously describing our computers as "rocks".

I think that the computers-as-rocks analogy works even better than this story, since there is no such thing as non-sentient meat, but there most certainly are rocks that can't compute

You've crystalized for me what I've always liked about this story, it implies that for some (horrifying?) reason the aliens are totally familiar with non-sentient meat.

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#164

Post by causality0 »

notnaut wrote: post #81
causality0 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally like Chiang's work and its derivatives but that was... kind of terrible. It felt like you told a government PSA writer to do sci-fi, except it isn't really sci-fi. It's an essay which posits that parrots are sapient and our failure to recognize it means we won't recognize alien sapience, and also wiping out parrots is bad. It's an if/then statement that stops at the if.

The entire overarching genre is often called speculative fiction, so your description of it is sort of accurate. Writing would be in a sorry state if the only stuff that got put out had to answer its own questions.

But it's not speculative at all. There are only like three sentences of any substance in the whole thing. A parrot who is more an idea than a character speaks to the reader claiming that a parrot understanding shapes and colors means that parrots are sapient, and humans not recognizing that means we won't recognize sapient alien life, P.S. humans are killing all the parrots. There is no story. The essay being from the perspective of a parrot instead of a person talking about parrots has no consequences and doesn't change the work at all. The whole thing is incredibly facile.

We Puerto Rican parrots have our own myths. They’re simpler than human mythology, but I think humans would take pleasure from them. Alas, our myths are being lost as my species dies out.

That's the only fictive part of the entire work.

It's just so lazy to change the premise of something without that change having any meaningful impact. What makes the statement by the parrot different from if it were from a human? Nothing whatsoever, and that's why this is a bad "story".

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#165

Post by utopcell »

atom058 wrote: post #162
utopcell wrote: post #87

"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotation ago, wants to be friendly again." 2 galactic rotations ? That's a long time to keep a grudge. But also fun to think that Earth is only ~20 galactic years old.

We are born meat and die meat; our life spans are short "Hyrdogen core clusters" might be around a bit longer On a related note, it would be curious to see how many years a computer could keep chugging along silently doing its job. Of course dependent on a reliable power supply and that We stop our habit of breaking all dependencies every three months. Maybe thousands of years would be possible? A bit interesting to…

The longest-running computer that we are aware of ran for about 4.5 billion years, and even then it only stopped because it was destroyed in order to facilitate an intergalactic highway construction project for a hyperspace express route.

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#166

Post by tarsinge »

tim333 wrote: post #160
shpx wrote: post #96

I've never understood what people see in this story. Meat is a complex organization of trillions of self-replicating machines, each of which (besides red blood cells maybe) is also incredibly complex... much more advanced than anything human minds have been able to build. I can't imagine what a sentient entity would have to be made out of or how much less "efficient" or stable it would have to be than me for me to fi…

My recollection is that there was quite a lot of debate back then on whether machines would be able to think or be conscious with arguments on the can't think side being Searle's Chinese Room and similar ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room ), which I always thought was a bit silly and people don't seem to take seriously now but did back in 1991. The Made of Meat story was quite a nice counter argument to tha…

The argument that sentience can't derive from computation alone because computations can be slowed down and done by hand still hold for me. The piece of paper written on or the silicon doesn't acquire different properties because what the operation will be used for, the GPU doesn't differentiate between graphic rendering and weight computation when it's adding 1. That's in opposition with animal brains that not only do computations but interact with real-world matter/fields directly. With that said of course we don't know if human like sentience is a prerequisite to (super)human level intelligence. But recent advancements in AI tends to diminish the argument sentience is a side effect of intelligence though.

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#168

Post by Mr_Minderbinder »

tarsinge wrote: post #166
tim333 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My recollection is that there was quite a lot of debate back then on whether machines would be able to think or be conscious with arguments on the can't think side being Searle's Chinese Room and similar ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room ), which I always thought was a bit silly and people don't seem to take seriously now but did back in 1991. The Made of Meat story was quite a nice counter argument to tha…

The argument that sentience can't derive from computation alone because computations can be slowed down and done by hand still hold for me. The piece of paper written on or the silicon doesn't acquire different properties because what the operation will be used for, the GPU doesn't differentiate between graphic rendering and weight computation when it's adding 1. That's in opposition with animal brains that not only…

> With that said of course we don't know if human like sentience is a prerequisite to (super)human level intelligence. But recent advancements in AI tends to diminish the argument sentience is a side effect of intelligence though.

We already know the answer to this and it is no, it is not a pre-requisite unless "sentience" is itself an emergent property of intelligence. Hutter's mathematical formulation of an optimally intelligent agent (AIXI) is not computable but approximations of it are, that is to say super-human intelligence IS just a computable function (as human intelligence is resource bound and suboptimal) with no extra "sentience" required. The only limiting factor at this point is the computational resources to compute this function, with the resources we have now it is still at the "toy" stage: playing noughts and crosses and Pac-Man etc.

People used to think that "creativity" was required for playing chess... clearly those people had not heard of Minimax.

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#169

Post by lproven »

The author, Terry Bisson, is now in his 70s and has bowel cancer. :-(

This recent New Yorker profile and interview is a great read.

«

Terry Bisson’s History of the Future

For more than two decades, one of pulp sci-fi’s masters has delivered headlines from a time line defined by the absurd.

»

https://archive.ph/k0RRI#selection-573.0-577.119

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#170

Post by kragen »

goldenkey wrote: post #151
admax88qqq wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't it be an agent for the short time that it's generating an intelligent looking paragraph? Do you know what gives rise to consciousness? If not how can we be sure it doesn't arise from a giant pile of linear algebra?

Consciousness is generated when the universe computes by executing conditionals/if statements. All machines are quantum/conscious in their degrees of freedom, even mechanical ones: https://youtu.be/mcedCEhdLk0?si=_ueWQvnW6HQUNxcm The universe is a min-consciousness/min-decision optimized supercomputer. This is demonstrated by quantum eraser and double slit experiments. If a machine does not distinguish upon certain p…

seems speculative
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