https://youtu.be/T6JFTmQCFHg?si=cfIs3_mZ9bI_WtX4
I like that performance even more than the story. Tom Noonan is a great actor. The other actor is wonderful in this too.
They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
91–100 of 181 posts
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#92Enjoyed this but upon reflection seems odd that they would have a word "meat" and yet be unfamiliar with biological systems / consciousness in animals.
"Meat" here reminds particular mammals that other mammals, other animals, are sentient as well. For many it is just meat.
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#93My favourite short story is Last Contact , by Steven Baxter[1]. It always scared the hell out of me, because it was so... mundane , to the very end. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080725045740/http://www.solari...
A lot like Melancholia . Or that one short story about discovering the light of another star was about to reach us… and getting the predictions of its intensity very wrong.
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#94Andy 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…
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Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#95Earlier 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…
> we also exhibit odd and illogical cultural trends Culture is illogical. If it was logical, it wouldn’t be culture.
Huh? You don’t understand what culture is. The study of logic itself, science, philosophy, etc are all part of culture. Culture is a shared heritage without which you would still be cracking nuts open with rocks.
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#96I'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 find it amusing. If it turns out that some slow geological process or a momentary dust cloud are actually self aware, the last thing I would do is laugh.
Is it just an abstract association that we're wet inside whereas computer chips are dry? That's just where our technology is right now, it largely reflects how our brains can't simulate fluid dynamics or conceive self replicating distributed systems efficiently enough so we resort to designing simple, solid state things.
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#97Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you! What a silly slip of the fingers Although, now that Douglas Adams has been brought up, I think I should also recommend his lesser-known book, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency , which I believe has some connection to Dr. Who.
And its sequel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. And the very strange not-for-everybody-but-definitely-for-me TV adaptation.
> And the very strange not-for-everybody-but-definitely-for-me TV adaptation.
Hah!! There's _two_ of us! ;-)
Okay, now I might actually try to make "that really cool jacket" from S2. (you know what I mean)
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a personality trait I identify with, made more stark because my wife is quite the opposite. IMHO, good fiction asks us to suspend our disbelief to create a novel setting and unique circumstances. Having accepted that, we still expect the world to behave according to its own logic. Bad fiction abuses the suspension of disbelief, and it rubs people like me (and the gp) wrong. In this case, it is a silly short sto…
As a (former?) physicist, I very much prefer to try to imagine what would need to be changed in our rules so the presented world would be possible, rather than "ok I accept this little change but everything else has to work as close as possible to our own universe"
Agreed. In this case we could infer that perhaps members of this alien species are either not all super intelligent, not super knowledgeable or at least not super knowledgeable in all areas. In this case, however, the the usage of "meat" here is intended to be a commentary on humanity of some sort. If the idea is that "aliens would just see humans as meat" then I do in fact think that point is somewhat diluted by GP's comment. "Meat" is not really an accurate word here, unless we take it as it's broader meaning of "food"[0], at which point "food" itself would be a better word.
Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
#100I'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…
i think the point of the story is exactly what you've gotten from it
namely, it's absurd to dismiss the possibility of self-awareness in some system because it's built out of parts different from the parts other self-aware systems you're familiar with are built out of
a useful thing to keep in mind when the stochastic parrots start squawking about how large language models aren't actually intelligent
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