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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)

#81

Post by notnaut »

causality0 wrote: post #78
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling" is an excellent short that is entirely available online - for those who don't yet appreciate his talent https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane... Edit: I was actually thinking of "The Great Silence" (aka the parrot one) which is a bit shorter but also available online. (The last line always gets to me) https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-…

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.

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

#82

Post by grammers »

surprisetalk wrote: post #15

Andy 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…

Nice, thanks for sharing!

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

#83

Post by pixl97 »

3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #11
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #6

This feels very shallow and wrong. Surely an super intelligent alien species that studied “meat” would know the depth of the organization starting with the organic molecules and extending to the cell and then to the neurons and neural networks and then the brain. The surprising thing to them would not be that we are made of meat but that we eat meat. How could we take such intricately organized matter and just burn i…

You think an advanced species would be surprised that we're made of what we consume? Quite a funny take, because there's literally no other option. The reason a power plant, or factory, or any machine at all doesn't "eat" what it's made of is because human engineers are the digestion enzymes and protein factories. We digest raw materials (amino acids) into parts (proteins) based on plans and schematics (DNA), and the…

>You think an advanced species would be surprised that we're made of what we consume?

The problem with advanced species we we have a sample size of one.

The problem with this sample size is it gives us no idea on the probabilities of intelligence looking anything like we think it does. In fact there is a non-zero probability that any intelligences we meet that cross space will have nothing to do with the host intelligences that created them. At least with our current knowledge of physics we don't see any way that digital 'life' could bootstrap itself. But currently us carbon based lifeforms are furiously cranking away at making thinking rocks that are built in factories. The fact that humans have a 4 billion long uninterrupted chain of molecular factories has nothing to do with other forms of life needing that at all.

Of course, if an AI kills another AI embodied AI is that much different from us killing a human and eating them?

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

#84

Post by 3cats-in-a-coat »

pixl97 wrote: post #83
3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think an advanced species would be surprised that we're made of what we consume? Quite a funny take, because there's literally no other option. The reason a power plant, or factory, or any machine at all doesn't "eat" what it's made of is because human engineers are the digestion enzymes and protein factories. We digest raw materials (amino acids) into parts (proteins) based on plans and schematics (DNA), and the…

>You think an advanced species would be surprised that we're made of what we consume? The problem with advanced species we we have a sample size of one. The problem with this sample size is it gives us no idea on the probabilities of intelligence looking anything like we think it does. In fact there is a non-zero probability that any intelligences we meet that cross space will have nothing to do with the host intelli…

Our sample size is way more than one actually, maybe if we just abandon the superficial concept of "advanced". For example the way insects organize in a colony and your cells organize in a body and humans organize in society is identical bar some circumstantial distinctions. When a principle comes about, reinvented independently so many times, we as intelligent beings need to realize "hey maybe that simply what it's like in general".

Most of what we are is actually none of our doing. Most of our discoveries are incidental (including in medicine, we don't know how many of our drugs work for example), and we're clearly unprepared to live in the world we ourselves created, hunched over keyboards in claustrophobic offices or locked up at home.

We're not an advanced species, our society is in-between a "colony" and "multicellular organism" and more and more of our advancements are created by computers for computers. We don't understand a lot of how an AI works, it trained itself, we just did back propagation and observed the prediction error get smaller over time.

Similarly today CPUs are designed by software written on the previous CPUs, machines are engineered on machines, and so on. The digital civilization is bootstrapping itself and eventually might leave the cocoon.

Saying other forms of life won't have parts that self-maintain to a degree is quite odd, because it's logically impossible. You see if you are not made of semi-indendent parts, you become extremely fragile. What exactly you think is the alternative? This is not about silicon vs carbon or analog vs digital. It's more about basic logic.

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

#86

Post by zeristor »

js2 wrote: post #64
surprisetalk wrote: post #15

Andy 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’ve seen They’re Made Out of Meat, posted several times.

But this is the first time I’ve seen The Egg, thanks for that.

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

#87

Post by utopcell »

"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.

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

#88

Post by utopcell »

surprisetalk wrote: post #15

Andy 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…

Adding to this Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" [1].

[1] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html

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

#90

Post by miffel »

helpfulmountain wrote: post #85

Enjoyed this but upon reflection seems odd that they would have a word "meat" and yet be unfamiliar with biological systems / consciousness in animals.

That's what seems odd? It's no more odd than aliens speaking English in the first place.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the language here is not only used to transmit the ideas in the story, but convey feeling. With the use of "meat" as a pejorative, you're supposed to understand the feeling of contempt and almost repulsion that these beings have towards us.

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