[HN Gopher] They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
___________________________________________________________________
They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
Author : mailarchis
Score : 346 points
Date : 2023-11-26 08:36 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mit.edu)
| myko wrote:
| I love this video adaptation:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ
| joeblubaugh wrote:
| The director uploaded a higher-quality version a few years ago!
|
| https://youtu.be/T6JFTmQCFHg?si=2j3-ctWbT7IXaZKj
| stavros wrote:
| Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be much higher quality,
| it's a bit more contrasty and less washed-out, but that's it.
| gpvos wrote:
| I love that one too, but sadly it leaves out the final few
| lines which make the piece so much more poignant.
| maxverse wrote:
| Past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737993
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| BBC Radio version: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00yyz3b
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| 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 it for fuel? It would be like
| coming across a power plant that is powered by burning CPUs and
| motherboards.
|
| They would wonder why we didn't just use the abundant sunlight
| and elements to power ourselves (like for example plants).
| timeon wrote:
| > This feels very shallow and wrong.
|
| What would you expect from meat.
| gizajob wrote:
| It's even typing its complaint in digitally encoded binary.
| Even when using our codes it's still thinking with its meat
| fingers. How beastly.
| pixl97 wrote:
| How dare it mock us so.
| CPLX wrote:
| "This science fiction would never happen in real life!!" is my
| favorite kind of comment.
| zdragnar wrote:
| 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 story, so it doesn't bother
| me much. On the other hand, complaining about TV shows and
| movies can practically become a sport with the the right
| company.
|
| For example, I quite enjoyed the Netflix movie Spectral,
| right up until the end, where they tried too hard to explain
| the mystery and violated things that I had not suspended my
| disbelief about. The TV show Fringe had a ton of these
| moments as well. Some were easy to accept, some episodes were
| painful to get through.
| drowsspa wrote:
| 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"
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meat
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| The answer is pretty obvious - building this intricately
| organized matter from scratch out of sunlight and elements is
| extremely inefficient, much better to recycle the existing
| bulding blocks of lower levels of organization.
|
| (You don't make software from scratch from sand and
| electricity, you use an off-the-shelf CPU and existing
| libraries.)
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Most of the meat consumed is not used to build things but is
| consumed by the body for energy.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Protein is used by the human body as construction material,
| not as fuel. (It is possible to use protein as a fuel
| source, but virtually no modern human follows a diet where
| that actually happens.)
| aatd86 wrote:
| What's matter?
| krallja wrote:
| Nothing, what's matter with you?
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| 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 then we put them into the machines.
|
| This is what your body does by itself. It's a factory that
| keeps building and rebuilding itself. That's in fact the only
| viable option for a resilient system. Think what's better,
| having kidneys, or needing dialysis? Self-sufficiency is always
| better for resilience and flexibility. Which... again, any
| intelligent species would know.
|
| The purpose of this story is to jolt us out of the status quo
| and see things from another perspective. A species having
| advanced culture doesn't mean they have no biases and
| prejudices based on their preconceived notions.
|
| We also fancy ourselves intelligent, but we have zero regard
| for "lower" lifeforms. In fact, we also exhibit odd and
| illogical cultural trends such as: 1. If
| someone abuses a pet dog or cat, we may put them in jail.
| 2. At the same time we abuse, kill and eat farm animals on a
| vast scale. Pigs are no less intelligent that a dog or a cat.
| 3. Yet if someone has a pet pig, we may call law enforcement on
| them for animal abuse, even if they take good care of their
| pig.
|
| Those three don't belong together in any way. Yet here we are.
| wavesbelow wrote:
| > Those three don't belong together in any way. Yet here we
| are.
|
| The difference here is degree of humanization of an animal.
| Recent Andrew Huberman podcast with a former FBI hostage
| negotiator[1] touched upon the topic.
|
| In animal research labs, the researchers are disallowed to
| name the animal subjects, only to assign numbers or codes.
|
| In a hostage situation, simply letting your captor know your
| name increases the chances of your survival. Conversely,
| having your face covered reduces the chances.
|
| Humanization and dehumanization of things, living beings,
| other humans and ourselves is something that we generally
| tend to do. A lot of cruelty in the world can be traced to
| this observation.
|
| 1. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhc
| Gh...
| teddyh wrote:
| > _we also exhibit odd and illogical cultural trends_
|
| Culture is illogical. If it was logical, it wouldn't be
| culture.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| 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.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Not illogical at all. A person that abuses animals is a
| potential menace to society - lack of empathy means they
| might easily abuse humans too. We are punishing sociopathic
| tendencies here.
|
| Farming animals is not sociopathic, it's a business decision
| based on economic interest.
|
| This works because animals don't have human rights.
| (Obviously.)
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "lack of empathy means they might easily abuse humans too"
|
| So just in case, we should jail most of our animal
| farmers/slaughterhouse workers as well?
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| You need to let this one simmer down and see how it is
| self-contradictory.
| wruza wrote:
| 4. When one animal devours another in a cruel way we couldn't
| imagine, no action. It's *natural* nature, human has no right
| to intervene.
|
| These inconsistecies are a hint that you may approach it from
| the wrong side. 4 contains a hint on that.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >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?
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| 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.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Noticed something that all plants have in common?
|
| How about an EV car which is powered exclusively by solar
| panels, without any battery, noticed what it has in common with
| plants?
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > all plants have in common
|
| There are more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of by
| your botany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotropa_uniflora
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't: The Tiniest Seed in the
| Blueberry Family
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54wpdvZNve4
|
| >Seeds of Monotropa uniflora - a plant that parasitizes
| fungi - are incredibly tiny. And they can afford to be,
| because all they need to grow is to be able to germinate on
| a mycelial thread of the mycorrhizal fungus that they
| parasitize.
|
| 8:22> "Mycoheterotrophic Lifestyles of the Lewd and
| Depraved"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myco-heterotrophy
|
| >Myco-heterotrophy (from Greek mukes mykes, "fungus",
| eteros heteros, "another", "different" and trophe trophe,
| "nutrition") is a symbiotic relationship between certain
| kinds of plants and fungi, in which the plant gets all or
| part of its food from parasitism upon fungi rather than
| from photosynthesis. A myco-heterotroph is the parasitic
| plant partner in this relationship. Myco-heterotrophy is
| considered a kind of cheating relationship and myco-
| heterotrophs are sometimes informally referred to as
| "mycorrhizal cheaters". This relationship is sometimes
| referred to as mycotrophy, though this term is also used
| for plants that engage in mutualistic mycorrhizal
| relationships.
| vidarh wrote:
| We can assume from the descriptions that while they've come
| into contact with beings with meat or meat-like structures as
| part of them, they've never encountered intelligent beings made
| of meat. And so they necessarily can't know all that much about
| the possible states of meat. So your "surely" is canonically
| wrong.
|
| You can argue they _ought to have_ known about that, but that
| is based on assuming life like ours is common, and the point of
| the story is that this is an assumption we 're making from a
| sample of one planet. In the in-story universe it is also
| canonically doubtful that life like ours in common, given that
| they clearly know of many other species, and can explore at FTL
| speeds, and yet still haven't run into one like ours.
|
| To me it feels shallow to criticise a story based on ignoring
| premises of the universe the story is set in. Criticise the
| premises, by all means, and argue it doesn't fit our universe.
| That's fine. That gets you to the point of the story: To get
| you thinking about _why_ we should assume life like ours is
| common.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Meat doesn't understand satire.
| gosub100 wrote:
| > They would wonder why we didn't just use the abundant
| sunlight and elements to power ourselves
|
| we do! all food we eat got its energy from the sun another
| plant/animal that did.
|
| * sans any food that was consumed from species that lived near
| hydrothermal vents.
| latexr wrote:
| > This feels very shallow and wrong.
|
| It's a comedic short story, not a dissertation on the powers of
| reasoning of undiscovered alien species. Rule of funny trumps
| accuracy.
|
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfFunny
|
| It's important to remember science fiction tends to explore and
| make a commentary on the human aspect. The best stories aren't
| about new technology, but its implications and effects on the
| human condition.
|
| With that view, you could read this story as a commentary on
| humans themselves. We also don't fully understand other species
| and are often astonished by what we discover. Above all, we can
| be incompetent and make mistakes. Remember the myth that "bees
| shouldn't be able to fly"?
|
| https://www.iflscience.com/the-strange-myth-that-bees-should...
|
| > Surely an super intelligent alien species (...) would (...)
|
| > The surprising thing to them would (...)
|
| > They would wonder (...)
|
| Sounds like you have your own ideas for a different short
| story.
| pixl97 wrote:
| People: "How dare this short story underestimate what aliens
| could imagine"
|
| Also people: "AI will never be as intelligent and capable has
| humans are"
| surprisetalk wrote:
| 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 to support local booksellers when possible :)
|
| [2] https://bookshop.org
| munchler wrote:
| God's Debris is by Scott Adams, not Douglas.
| surprisetalk wrote:
| 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.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Most everything in modern sci-fi is connected to either
| Hitchhikers or the doctor. Writers put jokes and references
| to them in nearly everything.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| And its sequel _The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul._
|
| And the very strange not-for-everybody-but-definitely-for-
| me TV adaptation.
| loxias wrote:
| > 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)
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Douglas Adams actually wrote a few Dr. Who episodes.
| neaden wrote:
| Yes, the first Dirk Gentley novel was based off a cancelled
| Dr. Who project called Shada, which I believe was recently
| released as an animated special.
| jtagen wrote:
| Jesus. This story is like a train. You know it's coming, then
| it hits you.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Ted Chiang is a genius, and pretty much everything he writes is
| magnificent. "Exhalation" is ridiculously good. "Understand" is
| probably my favorite.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| "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-ted-
| chia...
| edanm wrote:
| I love Ted Chiang, and "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of
| Feeling" is maybe my favorite of his stories. Certainly the
| one I think about most often.
| causality0 wrote:
| 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.
| notnaut wrote:
| 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.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Strongly agree. I have yet to run into a story written by Ted
| that I do not find amazing and through provoking.
| timetraveller26 wrote:
| The Egg is one of my life long favorite histories. kurzgesagt
| did a video animation of it a few years ago
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI
| colordrops wrote:
| Check out the short story The Jaunt by Stephen King. Serious
| existential terror.
| nmca wrote:
| If you enjoy darker/harder sci-fi "Axiomatic" is a great
| collection by Greg Egan.
| caskstrength wrote:
| Early Egan is excellent. Permutation City is one of my
| favorite novels.
| js2 wrote:
| _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
| zeristor wrote:
| 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.
| soufron wrote:
| Ahah just read The Egg after reading your comment... great
| advice! Loved it! Thank you!
| phlakaton wrote:
| Add to that "Thang" by Martin Gardner (yes, _that_ Martin
| Gardner, you Scientific American old-timers). I read it in an
| Isaac Asimov-curated short story collection once upon a time
| and it remains one of my favorite short-shorts.
| satori99 wrote:
| _Harrison Bergeron_ by Kurt Vonnegut, is the short story that
| always comes to my mind when I think about this type of
| thing.
| edanm wrote:
| So wonderful to see Smullyan recommended here!
|
| Though I _have_ to add, as a huge fan of Ted Chiang, that you
| missed one of his best short stories, and certainly his
| _shortest_ story - it 's about a page long and will probably
| take less than five minutes to read, iirc:
|
| "What's Expected of Us":
| https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a
| grammers wrote:
| Nice, thanks for sharing!
| utopcell wrote:
| Adding to this Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" [1].
|
| [1] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
| dmitshur wrote:
| There's a short story along these lines I remember reading
| somewhere, but I could never find it again. It describes the
| experience of someone whose brain is separated from their body
| but kept connected to it via a remote connection. Over time
| there are various experiments or different situations, like
| going into a cave to experience higher latency, maybe
| controlling multiple bodies at once, replacing the biological
| brain with an equivalent simulated one, and some others. I wish
| I could remember more of the details...
|
| Any chance it's one of the ones you mentioned above, or another
| someone recognizes? I was able to find that the phrase "brain
| in a vat" refers to this genre as a whole, but haven't yet
| found the particular version that I faintly recall reading.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I recommend _The Nine Billion Names of God_ by Arthur C.
| Clarke.
|
| https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.htm...
| agravier wrote:
| Also Lena by qntm: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
| fiforpg wrote:
| I 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 space-faring civilization.
| leeoniya wrote:
| "if god didnt want us to eat pigs, he wouldn't have made them
| out of bacon!"
| delecti wrote:
| 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".
| shawnz wrote:
| 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
| philistine wrote:
| - Can you believe those so-called humans. They made their
| computing devices out of rocks! They shovel sand out of
| beaches, make disgusting plates out of it, and force
| electricity through little paths of metal on them.
|
| - Ew!
| themanmaran wrote:
| The Long Sun series (also Gene Wolfe) was another excellent use
| of this. Everything is narrated by a priest unknowingly living
| on a generational starship and you're left to interpret the
| world around them.
| cubefox wrote:
| I think this idea was much smarter (and funnier) executed in
| Stanislaw Lem's short story "Prince Ferrix and the Princess
| Crystal".
| pohl wrote:
| Heck, all of The Cyberiad has this dismissal of meat done
| better.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| "But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way
| through."
| dwheeler wrote:
| I like this audio performance:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GggK9SjJpuQ&pp=ygUZVGhleSdyZ...
|
| It makes me smile each time.
| hoten wrote:
| This American Life recorded this w/ Maeve Higgins and H. Jon
| Benjamin.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5usXhX0zaO4&ab_channel=Podcl...
| RobRivera wrote:
| Sounds like Mcguirk
| Mistletoe wrote:
| He is McGuirk. Apologies if you whooshed me.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| My 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...
| HanClinto wrote:
| That was beautiful and haunting, thank you!
| hotnfresh wrote:
| 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.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Finis?
|
| http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0605041.txt
| DalasNoin wrote:
| I feel somewhat similar about the arrival of AGI, I definitely
| want to cherish my time now more. I think it is at least
| plausible that these are the last years of anything resembling
| any value. Even beyond my own existence. It is not exactly the
| same, with AGI there is more uncertainty about timelines and
| outcome, and there is no general expert opinion that one could
| defer to.
| SuperHeavy256 wrote:
| I love it, reminds me a lot of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
| jksmith wrote:
| https://youtu.be/T6JFTmQCFHg?si=cfIs3_mZ9bI_WtX4
| golemotron wrote:
| I like that performance even more than the story. Tom Noonan is
| a great actor. The other actor is wonderful in this too.
| badosu wrote:
| I enjoyed thoroughly this short exploring concepts of time
| perception between host and child simulated reality entities:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien...
| wbl wrote:
| This has been turned into a truly hilarious song with only a few
| changes. https://youtu.be/6NW67-Mu2wU
| DonHopkins wrote:
| If God didn't mean for people to eat other people, he wouldn't
| have made us of meat!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjAHw2DEBgw
| epgui wrote:
| Makes me think of the dual idea that "neural nets can't be
| conscious/etc"
| svat wrote:
| Also: "Your Whole Family Is Made Of Meat"
| https://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=484 which became the title of
| a Dinosaur Comics book.
| Borrible wrote:
| And they lack communion.
|
| Such loneliness.
|
| Poor Things.
|
| https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
| helpfulmountain wrote:
| Enjoyed this but upon reflection seems odd that they would have a
| word "meat" and yet be unfamiliar with biological systems /
| consciousness in animals.
| miffel wrote:
| 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.
| timeon wrote:
| "Meat" here reminds particular mammals that other mammals,
| other animals, are sentient as well. For many it is just meat.
| data_vault wrote:
| Another great interpretation of the story would be via
| speciesism/anthropocentrism, we consider ourselves better
| than other animals, but for the aliens, we would all be
| "meat".
| oxygen_crisis wrote:
| Odd, how?
|
| They're not unfamiliar with biological systems containing meat,
| they describe beings that are a "meat head with an electron
| plasma brain inside..."
|
| We have a word for wood, yet we would be astonished by
| consciousness and civilization coming from plants...
| utopcell wrote:
| "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.
| shpx wrote:
| 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 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.
| kragen wrote:
| 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
|
| shpxvat vf terng
| boringuser2 wrote:
| But they aren't, and there is no obvious vector for them to
| develop the capability.
| kragen wrote:
| while they don't yet rise to the level i would describe as
| 'intelligent' without qualifications, they do seem to be
| less unintelligent than most of the humans, and in
| particular most of the ones criticizing them in this way,
| who consistently repeat specific criticisms applicable to
| years-ago systems which have no factual connection to
| current reality
| boringuser2 wrote:
| It doesn't matter how it "appears".
|
| A disembodied paragraph that I've transmitted to you can
| appear to be intelligent or not, but it only really
| matters in the sense that you can ascribe that intellect
| to an agent.
|
| The LLM isn't an agent and no intellect can be ascribed
| to it. It is a device actual intelligent agents have made
| and ascribing it intellect is equally as erroneous.
| lucubratory wrote:
| Can any device ever be intelligent, according to you?
| andy99 wrote:
| There's no point in arguing with these people. We know
| how an llm works, we could reproduce it on a big piece of
| paper. But people that can't separate them from magic see
| "intelligence" in them because they sound humam like.
| There's an article "confused by a mirror" I've seen
| somewhere that summarizes it well.
|
| Anyway, if we encountered seemingly sentient life and
| didn't know how it worked, I can see keeping an open mind
| that it might indeed be sentient. If we trained a next
| token predictor and it produced coherent sentences, it
| would be ridiculous to assume it was intelligent/sentient
| because we know how it works and know it isn't.
|
| Edit: https://www.theverge.com/23604075/ai-chatbots-bing-
| chatgpt-i... I had the name wrong
| _heimdall wrote:
| How are you defining intelligence? And how are you
| measuring the abilities in existing LLM systems to know
| they don't meet these criteria?
|
| Honest questions by the way in case they come out snarky in
| text. I'm not aware of a single, agreed upon definition of
| intelligence or a verified test that we could use to know
| if a computer system has those capabilities.
| data_vault wrote:
| This is literature, it can be interpreted as how deeply we
| judge those who don't look like us.
| swayvil wrote:
| This is pretty good.
|
| It reminds me of Friendship is Optimal
|
| https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal
| doubloon wrote:
| weird 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
| mfringel wrote:
| Dave was a friend. He was one of the most intellectually
| curious people I knew. Gone way too soon.
| jevogel wrote:
| I first heard this story on an episode of This American Life. It
| was performed by H Jon Benjamin and Maeve Higgins. It's a great
| performance.
|
| https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803/greetings-people-of-ear...
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I feel like you could write a variation with this attitude:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_pDTiFkXgEE
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _They 're Made Out of Meat (2005) [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35848313 - May 2023 (5
| comments)
|
| _They 're made out of meat (1991)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31965062 - July 2022 (151
| comments)
|
| _They 're Made Out of Meat (1991)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737993 - Oct 2020 (292
| comments)
|
| _They 're Made Out of Meat [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436550 - June 2020 (4
| comments)
|
| _They 're Made Out of Meat_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22108726 - Jan 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _They 're Made Out of Meat_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11561522 - April 2016 (3
| comments)
|
| _They 're made out of meat_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8910420 - Jan 2015 (1
| comment)
|
| _They 're Made out of Meat_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152131 - Aug 2014 (170
| comments)
|
| _They 're made out of meat_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8098264 - July 2014 (1
| comment)
|
| _" They're Made out of Meat?" Short first contact sci-fi story_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3549320 - Feb 2012 (62
| comments)
|
| _They 're made out of Meat_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774139 - Aug 2009 (3
| comments)
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