Is it me, or is there a subliminal message in the banner of LightSpeed magazine? No time to look into it, but there appears to be a changing message that flashes on and off to take the place of the "LIGHTSPEED" graphic in the banner. The only one I caught was "RESIST".
I loved this story when I first read it. I made me feel wistful, like a world was dying and simultaneously being born. I can't explain it, but the idea of bears using fire has stayed with me ever since.
Ok - bear mode activated: I'll add 'The Star Bear' by Michael Swanwick, where a man's series of encounters with a bear in Paris echo his feelings about being a Russian emigre.
You saying “bear mode activated” reminds me of Dicey Dungeons...
(For those who don't know, there's a place in the game where, with a moderate amount of luck, you can trigger an item that transforms you into a bear, which changes your stats and available equipment, and you remain that way for the entire rest of the dungeon)
Fair enough.. It's not really sci-fi. Just a quiet slice of life with a twist.
If I may be so bold, this story would have sucked when I was younger, but now that I've been acquainted with the ages of all the characters, it makes sense.
The big bear tended the fire, breaking up the dry branches by holding one end and stepping on them, like people do. He was good at keeping it going at the same level. Another bear poked the fire from time to time but the others left it alone. It looked like only a few of the bears knew how to use fire and were carrying the others along. But isn’t that how it is with everything? Every once in a while, a smaller bear walked into the circle of firelight with an armload of wood and dropped it onto the pile. Median wood has a silvery cast, like driftwood.
They only look like they're made of meat. And they only look like they're made of meat to you because you know you're made of meat, and they look like you.
To them, they're just disguised as "what the creatures on this planet look like," which is obviously (to them) not meat, because they've never seen meat beings. To them, we are obviously not-meat, although how we appear is compatible with being meat. But silicone dyed the correct shade can look like meat. Stone painted the right color can look like meat.
And if you say that silicone and stone don't look like meat even when prepared to copy it, bear in mind that we are made of meat and very good at distinguishing it. Different races favor different attributes for distinguishing one person from another, hence why "they all look alike" is somewhat true for pretty much any "them" you care to name. Rocky from Project Hail Mary almost certainly thinks all humans look alike.
"probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
The two talking, and other races, are machines that cover themselves however they like. These two are machines with artificial skins. That is normal. Fully meat beings are not. At least that is how I always read this story.
In the story, the very idea of permanently meat-based beings appals them, and in fact one of them doesn't entirely believe it. So why would they look like meat to "blend in", a priori, if one of them doesn't even fathom the idea? "Blend in" with what? One of them doesn't believe what it's dealing with!
Like a sibling comment mentions, they talk about "meat sounds"... using meat sounds! Why would they find it surprising if that's how they are communicating in the short film? They are not depicted as communicating via telepathy or whatever.
(Yes, I understand the limitations of low budget shorts. But it doesn't mean it has to work...)
> I'd imagine British spies in WWII sometimes wore swastikas to blend in?
British spies in WWII wouldn't do that if the entire concept of what a swastika was baffled them. You have to understand at least basically what the thing you're looking at is in order to use it as a symbol.
If you have _no_ concept of people being made out of meat being possible, you don't dress up as people made out of meat. You do that if it's a common concept to you and you're trying to fit in.
> And they do say they’ve studied and probed for several human lifetimes.
Only one of them has. The other is entirely surprised by the whole concept, and wouldn't even entertain disguising itself as something it has never considered and in fact it's being convinced during the story it even exists.
It's important for the story to work that one of the beings is entirely unconvinced and has to be told, as they discuss the matter, that this is an actual thing!
> He’s dressed like someone told “hey you have to try to blend in” and didn’t really know how.
Blend with what? It (the alien) didn't believe these "meat" sentient beings existed when the story starts! It had to be told during the conversation. It thought there must have been machines somewhere who were the real sentient beings. How can anyone attempt to blend in with something one doesn't believe exists?
I understand the adaptation changes this, because there's no other way of working with human actors and also staying within budget. I understand the decision; I'm just saying it misses the mark and makes the story way less funny.
The way I envision this story is a couple of aliens, much like the scenes with the Simpsons aliens, hovering in a spaceship near Earth, discussing humans, with only one of them having actually seen a human. It doesn't work if both have seen them.
All in my opinion, of course, taste and sense of humor are completely subjective.
You have a point. Maybe if I hadn't read the story first it would work better for me.
In the story, there's little doubt these are aliens (though their physical form, if they have any, is never described). If there's any doubt, it's about what they are talking about -- but this is dispelled pretty soon too.
I think the real reason is simply budget.
I can understand the limitations of working around budget, and constraints sometimes spark some inventive storytelling, like in the pretty cool "The Booth at the End", which has a very similar minimalistic setting in a diner! In fact, this short somewhat reminded me of that much better show.
(If you haven't watched "The Booth at the End", I strongly encourage you to do so... it used to be free online ages ago, not sure now).
Why? Surely one can criticize a movie, book, videogame, etc, without being required to create a better one in turn.
I didn't hate it, and I always appreciate the charm of low budget productions. I'm just saying this particular adaptation doesn't work for me, and trying to explain why.
One low budget feature-length film about aliens I quite liked (though it obviously has a higher budget, and of course its own set of flaws; and to be clear I'm not arguing both productions are in the same ballpark!) is "The Vast of Night" [1]. I quite liked the actors and the directorial choices.
* This is a virtual environment and the "meat actors" are depicting avatars of virtual/not-meat entities inhabiting that world. That's why there's inconsistencies with real life, for example the red guy's clothes. This was what I thought when I first saw this short.
* This was really an exchange of concepts and data in a language not really suitable for humans to understand. So what you are seeing is not what actually took place, but a translation. Some machine took the abstract data interchange and translated it to what it thought would be more appropriate for a meat head to understand, including setting it up in an environment that would make sense to a human. But it made some mistakes (the clothes, the weird behavior of some characters). This could have predicted AI Video slop, in a way.
Plus for the story to make sense, they have to be seeing Earth from scans/sensors, and one of them must in fact not be familiar with Earth at all, having disbelief in what the other is saying. But if they are both there, in a diner, they cannot be as skeptical.
I get the constraints of short indie films, I love them regardless, but in this particular case it completely misses the mark.
You just have to go along with the idea that skin provides no indication of meatiness and that the two aliens are Ford Prefect types, then the short film lands just fine.
I guess. It's still hard to mesh with the idea they don't believe these humans flap their meat at each other, or that they do not communicate exclusively via radio signals.
It doesn't match my idea that these are two energy/mechanical beings discussing a faraway planet from their spaceship or whatever, talking theory without actually seeing the beings they are discussing.
You've never encountered, say, a baffling code bug that couldn't possibly be caused by X, spent a day on it, and found out it turns out to be caused by X?
More seriously, what you describe is partly the short story. The short film adaptation doesn't quite work for me, for the reasons I explained in other comments.
Yeah, I found this was definitely a case of "the book was much better than the movie", especially odd since most of the dialog was word-for-word, yet they skipped over the small parts that gave the story its lesson and relatability. Like the whole "officially or unofficially" part is one of my favorite parts of the original story, as it makes it seem like these intergalactic beings have to deal with the same concerns as Bob in corporate HR.
I think it highlights why the original text was uniquely brilliant and why it makes it reliably makes it to the top of HN every year or so.
That's Tom Noonan (who recently passed away) and Ben Bailey; one of the kids in the other booth we see briefly is played by Gbenga Akinnagbe in his first film role, who rose to greater prominence as Chris Partlow on The Wire.
Discarding scientific evidence usually looks differently than "we discussed that we didn’t liked it". Is is usually not looking at all, never starting a discussion, or even lacking an intellectual framework to comprehend the phenomenon.
That short story makes me think of the kea (Alpine parrot) of New Zealand.
They're ridiculously smart and dexterous.
When I was a ranger I'd tell tourists to think of them as "monkeys who can fly... ...you're laughing, but I'm serious".
Their upper and lower beaks can move independently like a human's thumb and forefinger, unlike nearly all other birds, and they can also use their beaks like scissors, or to undo screws - that last one is very true, I'm not making it up, their upper beak makes for an effective flathead.
They share knowledge like corvids do, once one kea learns that the self closing door on your shop closes slowly enough, after a human enters, to give them time to get in, steal a chocolate bar and get out, there'll be five more trying it tomorrow.
They can undo zips on your backpack and then undo the latches on your lunchbox to steal your sandwiches, or they'll untie your bootlaces (yep they can undo knots) and remove them from your boots, or remove your tent pegs, or maybe cut your guylines, all of this just for fun.
There was a gang that would deploy one of their number at a viewing platform to act very engagingly and oh so photogenic to distract the tourists while its mates quietly stole interesting things from the hand bags, backpacks,and, if you left the door open, cars(!) of the tourists who were focused on the photogenic decoy putting on a show.
They had a bit of a penchant for passports during my time. Most of which were last seen being dropped into a deep and dangerous mountain ravine by a parrot that then let out a mocking laugh.
There used to be a gang of juvenile males that would deflate tyres at the local public toilets to prove they were tough - because the noise depressing a tyre valve made was scary, so the longer you pressed it, the tighter tougher you were, while your mates egged you on.
They also have distinct and recognisable facial expressions they use to indicate their emotions.
They've been taught to speak in the past - but the fact that they can survive, and indeed, they thrive, in the harshest environment in New Zealand is far more indicative of their intelligence than any Polly Wanna A Cracker would ever be.
> the fact that they can survive, and indeed, they thrive, in the harshest environment in New Zealand is far more indicative of their intelligence than any Polly Wanna A Cracker would ever be.
Bisson once lived in the town just across the river from where I grew up and was an inspiration for me as a nerdy kid from the sticks who just wanted to write science fiction. His novels Talking Man, Fire on the Mountain, Voyage to the Red Planet, and Pirates of the Universe (don't be fooled by those last two titles; he was always undermining old sci-fi tropes) were among my favorites. This story is one of his goofier ones. I wasn't as big a fan of his short stories as they tended towards the jokey style of absurdism, but a favorite of mine is his "Bears Discover Fire."
This reminds me of a different short story I read somewhere that I, for the life of me, cannot find anymore. It's about aliens discussing earth (but they call it differently I believe) and how far they have evolved. They have 2 books/logs. One containing all life, and then another book containing all super intelligent life. They find out that earth already has some super advanced stuff, so they are deciding if it should move to the second log.
"We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”
Somebody recently recounted that they had been a convention of people who been 'abducted' by aliens. They commented that "Aliens certainly have a type".
Is it surprising? It seems likely you could build a complete working model of the universe with no provision for consciousness at all. As far as modern science goes, it's an intractable problem
That wouldn’t be complete though. I mean that an outside observer could view a simulation of the universe by your model, down to the subatomic particle level, and find no differences with the real world. There is no measurable “consciousness field” as far as we know, so how can our science even begin to approach the topic?
It doesn't seem likely to me that in, just a couple hundred years, humans have developed such a thorough understand of every natural process as all that.
Consciousness might have actually started today at 7am and, before that, we were all automatons without subjective experience of the world, just going through the motions.
You might say that's impossible, because yesterday you were conscious and you know that, but you can't prove it to anyone.
Epistemologically, this is not a problem that can be solved with "give it time".
This is fun to read but any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat, probably kept the original meat safe in a corner of the galaxy too..
The universe were quite uniform in character. Galaxies, stars, they are very predictable and essentially the same everywhere, across billions of years (both time and distance), can't see why that doesn't apply to life too in a general sense. Maybe different RNA building blocks and genetic chemistry, but probably work out similar to meat and organic stuff.
> This is fun to read but any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat
That does not follow at all. It's _likely_ that life elsewhere would be carbon-based since carbon is so useful and common. It is not a requirement. Silicon has been proposed as a replacement. While not as flexible as carbon, it's pretty close. Silicon-based lifeforms wouldn't be "organic" at all. Even if we just stick to carbon, there are many organic compounds (and lifeforms) that aren't anything close to what we would consider 'meat'.
We are working with N=1. Until we find more lifeforms elsewhere, we can't assume anything beyond basic physics and chemistry. RNA isn't a given. A lifeforms probably needs something that will pass along instructions to their offspring (in whatever form they take). It doesn't have to be RNA.
For a fictional description of a lifeforms that doesn't have RNA, DNA or anything remotely similar, I like to point out Blindsight, by Peter Watts. https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
> any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat
Perhaps it's predecessor was just advanced enough to build self-modifying replicators and fire them out into space. Eventually it hits a planet or asteroid and gradually becomes sentient and intelligent. No trace of how it originated.
1st generation stars seed the galaxies with carbon.
2nd generation stars are a sea of amino-acid comet soup. One bag-of-mostly-water lifeform evolves sentience. Its legacy is silicon intelligence, broadcast through the galaxy. It disappears.
3rd generation stars illuminate meat-based life, but it holds no novelty for the silicon travelers between the stars.
There's no refutation of anything here, I seriously thought about the possibility of evolution without meat, but you should be convince me otherwise if you can show me how it can arise naturally after big bang.
It's a discussion of reality stemming from an inspirational fiction. The whoosh apply to you.
Seriously...don't read any other science fiction stories. The things they write about that we can't indulge you by proving how they could possibly happen will make your head explode.
I think the point is that the story’s universe is populated by intelligent life forms that did not evolve from any lineage of meat. Hence the reference at the end to the hydrogen cluster.
It’s called fiction for a reason. Glad you’ve risen above that nonsense!
I personally hate that it implies there are faster ways to travel than light speed. We know this to be a hard limit in the physics of our universe and it rubs me the wrong way when SF writers just glaze over reality. Not to mention hydrogen life forms, what’s that about!?
I can relate. However. The unspoken rider is "...according to our current understanding". I don't think you have the footing to constrain the future to only what we understand today, especially since we can't reconcile our two most fundamental theories. I don't think you can do that even if you could explain quantum entanglement in terms of relativity.
On a separate note, science fiction isn't generally about science, imo, it's about human politics (Greg Egan being an outlier). The cod-science gives colour and setting. If you read it as stories about humanity, maybe the charlatanry won't irk you so much. I find this mindset helps me deal with my own irascibility.
Things like star and galaxy formation/interactions are (relatively) straightforward, with fairly simple processes/mechanics at the heart of it. It's easier to predict on such a large-scale what's going to happen.
Things are far more complex on a biological level, which makes it harder to make generalized predictions. I see no reason to infer that life would only consistently evolve into organic life as we know it.
I love this short story, it's one whose memory visits me unbidden from time to time. I blogged about it over 20 years ago[1], and it was already around 15 years old at that time. OMNI magazine was great.
Why is "They Were Made Out Of Meat" Hacker News favourite, but "Bordered in Black" is always flagged?
Gemini:
In short, "They're Made Out of Meat" makes people feel smart and curious, while "Bordered in Black" makes people feel uncomfortable and argumentative—and on Hacker News, "uncomfortable and argumentative" is a fast track to being flagged.
Asking Gemini with the titles swapped will give you an equally confident story and reasoning about why "Bordered in Black" is actually preferred. This, and more, is why we're interested in what you have to say about the stories instead of what the LLM has to say.
What makes you a big fan of the story/reminded you of it here? I just gave it a re-read and thought it was alright. Not my favorite work of his... but certainly not bad either. Perhaps I've just read too many Sci-Fi stories to be properly shocked by the theme given the relatively short time to be immersed in the setting :).
Do you have an example of it being flagged? I only see one old post from 7 years ago (not flagged), and that links to a scribd pdf rather than the author's website
By all accounts the CPUs we've made with ridiculous stuff like 2nm transistors is _surely_ more advanced than neurons, right? We just haven't figured out how to wire them properly :)
The 2nm claim is all marketing. The smallest features on these gates is much larger. For example, the gate pitch (what this measure used to refer to) on the 2nm process is actually 45 nanometers.
Nature's machines, for example, for reproducing DNA or for photosynthesis, are in a totally different league of 'precision engineering' to anything that our brightest engineers have ever created.
At times we get all giddy because we have invented a quartz clock, a wheel, a straight line or a calculator that seems to be better than anything in the world of nature, however, we sometimes have to overlook nature or forget to question why nature didn't evolve such things. With the clock, every cell in our body has some 'timing circuitry' tied into day/night cycles, seasons and much else. We just insist on doing it our way and proclaiming it better.
Counterpoint: biology looks like vibe-coding. I would hate to have nature as a colleague, she's an arrogant fool with a mail-order degree. I'd rather maintain a Jeep than a knee.
I still remember seeing Terry do a reading of this at Lunacon, I think, shortly after it was published. It was a good reading, he really knew how to land a joke.
If they exist, they're probably currently placing bets whether we will manage to destroy ourselves (or at least set our civilization back by centuries) with our nuclear weapons, our climate change or our social media...
I like the idea we live inside the Veil of Madness (A sort of galactic bermuda triangle that drives inhabitants insane, so all spacefaring civilizations stay away).
There was a time not long ago when reportedly looking at the emails being exchanged around the world one would think the most pressing matter, discussed at length, was how to "enlarge your penis".
I upvoted because I didn't know the short film existed and it's interesting.
I think the short film completely misses the mark if both entities are there in human form, in a diner. (Of course, budget constraints, and the adaptation cannot just be two inorganic beings talking, but still...)
I like this story, but I never liked the wording "made out of meat", as if the word exists in a world without animals. I could have accepted "proteins", but that's not a catchy title.
I get your point but I don't think that those quotes establish familiarity with meat based animals. Familiarity with animals would be something like "yeah, sure, we know about that planet with cows but this is something else entirely!" (Also humans wouldn't be so surprising if they knew about things like cows).
Their references are not to creatures that are meat through-and-through but fictional alien races that have a kind of incidental relationship to meat that doesn't establish meat-based cognition as normal the way that animals would.
I think this story is tacky and doesn't really make sense. Do they already know what meat is? And if so, why do they act surprised when they find that lifeforms are "made" of it? Why even do they have an opinion on "meat"?
I find it good for a chuckle perhaps but there's nothing profound in here.
It has something to say if you compare it to the traditional arguments against the possibility of AI like Searle's terrible "Chinese Room" analogy - the point is arguing that computers can't possibly think because they are "just machines following programming" is a lot like these mechanical aliens believing that the idea of thinking meat is absurd.
I think you completely missed the point about the Chinese Room. The assertion wasn't that machines can't think or compute, but that they don't necessarily have any experience of the thing they are computing. We still have not the faintest idea where consciousness comes from and the Chinese Room thought experiment I think demonstrates this.
The problem is all this talk of "onsciousness" is vague. It's like "free will" -- it's just words, not a real objective thing that can possibly be studied objectively. It's just that people are vain. We wanted to believe we lived at the center of the universe (or at least our collection of planets) and Copernicus taught us otherwise. Then we believed we were of a different sort of being than the animals until Darwin taught us otherwise. True machine intelligence (although we aren't there yet) frightens us in a very similar sense.
The original formulation of Chinese Room deals with ‘understanding’. One supposes that understanding implies some form of subjective experience. I take OP’s use of ‘think’ to refer to an equivalent concept
This does what the best speculative fiction does, attempts to stretch and expand your understanding of the real world by presenting a provocative fictional reality.
The author is trying to get you to speculate on the kind of intelligence that would say this about humans.
> "“Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”"
What they cannot fathom is a sentient lifeform that achieves things but lives their entire lives as meat-based things, flapping their meat mouth parts to make disgusting meat sounds at each other. And I think they really never thought much about human reproduction!
As I’ve gotten older, it’s become increasingly hard for me to understand how anyone can read such comical reductionism as enlightenment.
We are infinitely complex arrangements of systems built upon systems, from the quantum properties of carbon atoms up through the proteins that make the “meat” we are so glibly reduced to, through the complexities and adaptations of mammalian bodies, up to the fearsome order of the human brain and the intricate sprawl of human society and culture.
To reduce us to anything less is to deny the awesomeness of the cosmos itself.
It's a good question, because I would say it's mostly not satire. It's kind of making fun of the perspective of thinking meat is unimpressive, but that's not exactly a view held by anyone except in the fiction of the story. I think toward the very very end tonally it veers close to a satirical vibe but it's hard to put a finger on what about it counts as satire strictly speaking.
I think basically the humor is how unimpressed they are with a Sagan-style sense of wonder at the cosmos that is implicitly treated as the human perspective, how bleak it would be if true. The aliens ridiculing that is funny, and the actual bleakness of it is funny too.
I think it's (partly) satirizing how we feel about ourselves as the apex beings, and as explorers of the cosmos and colonizers. What if we are actually quite subpar, and the actual apex beings in the universe find us so unlikely and disgusting that they prefer to pretend they are not there, thus giving an answer to Fermi's Paradox? They don't want to conquer us, they don't want to have anything to do with us!
But of course, it's also satirizing this alien-as-a-bug idea, so common of early scifi, that the alien is a disgusting mess of antennae or simly appendages. What if we were disgusting to enlightened aliens?
What we can absolutely be sure of is that Bisson wasn't making fun of meat or the human brain, the thought that apparently irked the topmost commenter.
I thought it was satirising faux-intellectual SF short stories that try to seem deeper than they are. If it’s just an actual faux-intellectual SF short story, that’s much less interesting.
On this planet, we’ve found that basically anything can be used to perform computation, electronics (semiconductors, vacuum tubes), mechanics (linkages, gears, cams, steel balls) , pneumatics, photonics, electromechanics, electrochemistry, optoelectronics, chemistry, phonons, hydraulics, even collectible card games. Donald Trump has said many dumb things, but he was right when he said “everything is computer”.
And almost anything has been used to transfer information. Light (fire, smoke, electricity, heated wires, coloured flags, mirrors, lasers, bioluminescence, LEDs, discharge tubes, electric arcs), sound (vibrating strings, membranes, tubes of air in hundreds of configurations, explosives, blunt objects), chemistry, electricity, electromagnetic radiation, waving body parts around, burning pieces of dead tree to make coloured marks on squished pieces of dead tree, magnetism, scratching into rocks, circles of aluminium with tiny holes in them embedded in plastic, transistors, circles of vinyl with wavy grooves cut in them, pieces of paper with tiny holes punched in them, rockets, flares.
So the notion that any advanced spacefaring civilisation would be astonished by any form of creature or communication method given how much variety there is on this one planet is hard to entertain, even as satire.
> I thought it was satirising faux-intellectual SF short stories that try to seem deeper than they are. If it’s just an actual faux-intellectual SF short story, that’s much less interesting.
I think it's neither. It's a humorous scifi story. Bisson had a sense of humor (much like, say, Asimov also had one and wrote many humorous stories that you'd best not overanalyze!).
> So the notion that any advanced spacefaring civilisation would be astonished by any form of creature or communication method given how much variety there is on this one planet is hard to entertain, even as satire.
It may be hard to entertain, but the trope this is riffing on was very well established in scifi. Many people still think in terms of mankind exploring and conquering new frontiers, space included.
You're overanalyzing this. It's satire, a joke story.
Part of the human expression of disgust includes thought terminating cliches. Imagine how the average person would talk about a race of bug-like aliens, no matter how advanced they were. It would be a dismissive kind of 'ew, gross'. The humor is in seeing other beings reacting that way to us. I don't think it's supposed to imply the aliens are some kind of flawless geniuses revealing the true nature of human beings.
How many of the billions of people alive have your perspective? How many of our leaders even, given the news in the last... let's say two weeks. But you can look at thousands of years of history and to me it still seems that people and their leaders don't share your view of "infinitely complex arrangements". I mean they might think such of themselves, but of "others", obviously not.
The story mentions some "official rules". Consider that we also have official rules and behaviour that does not obey them.
I dare suggest your own view might be reductionist.
I feel like the point of the story was that it was celebrating how spectacular the brain is, by showing how unlikely it would seem, and how incredulous another intelligent creature could be upon hearing of it if it weren't already built into their sense of normal.
It might be that this alternative cosmic sense of "normal" is not a real thing (meat may prove to be more cosmically normal than machine at the end of the day), but the sense of wonder in response to something as ridiculous as a brain, in its capabilities and its design, is a real feeling that the story is appropriately trying to evoke.
> As I’ve gotten older, it’s become increasingly hard for me to understand how anyone can read such comical reductionism as enlightenment.
First, it's a humorous piece.
Second, it's as much a critique of the aliens as of the humans. The aliens are also depicted as clueless about what makes human life interesting, and even shown to be petty in the end. Their behavior is entirely "human", so if they are criticizing humans for it...
Do you feel the same about cows and pigs and chickens? One way to read this is your reading. Another way to read it is as an attempt to make you question the concept of meat.
If you put two stones in the ground, they define a line. It goes through the center of mass of both stones and extends towards both sides through the universe.
Now remove the stones.
Does the line stop existing? You can still "see it" in your brain. It could be argued that the line has always been there. That the stones were just a marker. A means for an idea to manifest in the physical word. You could put any two other markers at any point on that line and they would represent the same line.
The idea that "the cube is made out of meat" is akin to saying that "the line is made out of stone". Ideas always exist, their representation in the physical world don't.
Your sense of consciousness is just one of those representations. It is "immortal", just like the line is. In principle it could exist without the physical substrate that is your brain, or in a different substrate. Probably there's a way to encode all of that into a big number.
I think this is where the idea of an "immortal soul" comes from. It is however kind of easy to misinterpret it, especially if one is a mesopotamian sheperd who explains the world with gods and religion.
This is the funniest possible place attempt to open a hard problem of consciousness conversation, but also fitting because it makes it as ridiculous as I feel it actually is.
On another level even this clarification kind of misses the mark because many/most versions of the HPOC still treat physical substrate as a necessary condition, just not a sufficient one, sometimes will appeal to radio receivers, or the mental and physical being two aspects of the same underlying thing (sometimes called neutral monism). I personally think that view is mistaken and deeply confused, but even so, it's a view that ties consciousness to the substrate of "thinking meat" without reducing it, and would probably be a moot point from the aliens perspective.
Also by Terry Bisson and one of my favorite stories is Bears Discover Fire 1990 https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fi...
Is it me, or is there a subliminal message in the banner of LightSpeed magazine? No time to look into it, but there appears to be a changing message that flashes on and off to take the place of the "LIGHTSPEED" graphic in the banner. The only one I caught was "RESIST".
"Resist" and "Do not obey in advance". It's just an animated GIF.
There’s definitely something, I saw RESIST pop up for a flash as well.
I loved this story when I first read it. I made me feel wistful, like a world was dying and simultaneously being born. I can't explain it, but the idea of bears using fire has stayed with me ever since.
I'm reminded of an excellent surreal novel, "The Bear Comes Home" by Rafi Zabor, about an ursine jazz saxophonist.
Ok - bear mode activated: I'll add 'The Star Bear' by Michael Swanwick, where a man's series of encounters with a bear in Paris echo his feelings about being a Russian emigre.
https://reactormag.com/the-star-bear-michael-swanwick/
You saying “bear mode activated” reminds me of Dicey Dungeons...
(For those who don't know, there's a place in the game where, with a moderate amount of luck, you can trigger an item that transforms you into a bear, which changes your stats and available equipment, and you remain that way for the entire rest of the dungeon)
I am in fact a bear at this very moment.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-most-reprinted...
That's the same feeling I had about the first half of Children of Time.
I didn't really get it to be honest. I feel like something went over my head.
Fair enough.. It's not really sci-fi. Just a quiet slice of life with a twist.
If I may be so bold, this story would have sucked when I was younger, but now that I've been acquainted with the ages of all the characters, it makes sense.
Same, I thought the newberries were going to be some sort of intelligence enhancer.
Just read this for the first time. Wow.
The short film someone made is pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg
The short film makes no sense, as the 2 people talking are meat themselves.
They only look like they're made of meat. And they only look like they're made of meat to you because you know you're made of meat, and they look like you.
To them, they're just disguised as "what the creatures on this planet look like," which is obviously (to them) not meat, because they've never seen meat beings. To them, we are obviously not-meat, although how we appear is compatible with being meat. But silicone dyed the correct shade can look like meat. Stone painted the right color can look like meat.
And if you say that silicone and stone don't look like meat even when prepared to copy it, bear in mind that we are made of meat and very good at distinguishing it. Different races favor different attributes for distinguishing one person from another, hence why "they all look alike" is somewhat true for pretty much any "them" you care to name. Rocky from Project Hail Mary almost certainly thinks all humans look alike.
"probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
The two talking, and other races, are machines that cover themselves however they like. These two are machines with artificial skins. That is normal. Fully meat beings are not. At least that is how I always read this story.
Machines with artificial skins? I'll have to re-read the story, I thought the "meat" was matter and the aliens were made of energy.
No, it's literal meat that they have issues with. Machines are fine, hydrogen clusters are fine.
You should probably go watch the Terminator movies.
They only look like meat to blend in. It's the only way to figure out if they're made out of meat.
> They only look like meat to blend in. It's the only way to figure out if they're made out of meat.
Perhaps the makers of the movie neglected to read the story before creating a script?
In the story, the very idea of permanently meat-based beings appals them, and in fact one of them doesn't entirely believe it. So why would they look like meat to "blend in", a priori, if one of them doesn't even fathom the idea? "Blend in" with what? One of them doesn't believe what it's dealing with!
Like a sibling comment mentions, they talk about "meat sounds"... using meat sounds! Why would they find it surprising if that's how they are communicating in the short film? They are not depicted as communicating via telepathy or whatever.
(Yes, I understand the limitations of low budget shorts. But it doesn't mean it has to work...)
> So why would they look like meat to "blend in", a priori, if one of them doesn't even fathom the idea?
I'd imagine British spies in WWII sometimes wore swastikas to blend in?
They infiltrating to investigate. It needn't be an endorsement of the practice.
> I'd imagine British spies in WWII sometimes wore swastikas to blend in?
British spies in WWII wouldn't do that if the entire concept of what a swastika was baffled them. You have to understand at least basically what the thing you're looking at is in order to use it as a symbol.
If you have _no_ concept of people being made out of meat being possible, you don't dress up as people made out of meat. You do that if it's a common concept to you and you're trying to fit in.
But they mention species with a meat phase.
The concept of meat isn’t foreign. Meat that’s sentient and has no cybernetic parts or phase is.
And they do say they’ve studied and probed for several human lifetimes.
> And they do say they’ve studied and probed for several human lifetimes.
Only one of them has. The other is entirely surprised by the whole concept, and wouldn't even entertain disguising itself as something it has never considered and in fact it's being convinced during the story it even exists.
It's important for the story to work that one of the beings is entirely unconvinced and has to be told, as they discuss the matter, that this is an actual thing!
The one that looks super goofy?
He’s dressed like someone told “hey you have to try to blend in” and didn’t really know how.
Picking the right name is also important to blending in. For example: Ford Prefect.
Like the guy in Star Trek IV who took too much LDS.
Tom Noonan in the short film, yes.
> He’s dressed like someone told “hey you have to try to blend in” and didn’t really know how.
Blend with what? It (the alien) didn't believe these "meat" sentient beings existed when the story starts! It had to be told during the conversation. It thought there must have been machines somewhere who were the real sentient beings. How can anyone attempt to blend in with something one doesn't believe exists?
I understand the adaptation changes this, because there's no other way of working with human actors and also staying within budget. I understand the decision; I'm just saying it misses the mark and makes the story way less funny.
The way I envision this story is a couple of aliens, much like the scenes with the Simpsons aliens, hovering in a spaceship near Earth, discussing humans, with only one of them having actually seen a human. It doesn't work if both have seen them.
All in my opinion, of course, taste and sense of humor are completely subjective.
It's partly for dramatic purposes, to slow the realisation of the audience that they are aliens talking about people.
And, ofc, in-drama logic; the beings (of silicon or whatever) are/were blending in with humans to study them.
You have a point. Maybe if I hadn't read the story first it would work better for me.
In the story, there's little doubt these are aliens (though their physical form, if they have any, is never described). If there's any doubt, it's about what they are talking about -- but this is dispelled pretty soon too.
I think the real reason is simply budget.
I can understand the limitations of working around budget, and constraints sometimes spark some inventive storytelling, like in the pretty cool "The Booth at the End", which has a very similar minimalistic setting in a diner! In fact, this short somewhat reminded me of that much better show.
(If you haven't watched "The Booth at the End", I strongly encourage you to do so... it used to be free online ages ago, not sure now).
Well, if you think you can do a better job, make it happen. Make the film you want to see.
Why? Surely one can criticize a movie, book, videogame, etc, without being required to create a better one in turn.
I didn't hate it, and I always appreciate the charm of low budget productions. I'm just saying this particular adaptation doesn't work for me, and trying to explain why.
One low budget feature-length film about aliens I quite liked (though it obviously has a higher budget, and of course its own set of flaws; and to be clear I'm not arguing both productions are in the same ballpark!) is "The Vast of Night" [1]. I quite liked the actors and the directorial choices.
---
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6803046/
I interpreted this in two different ways:
* This is a virtual environment and the "meat actors" are depicting avatars of virtual/not-meat entities inhabiting that world. That's why there's inconsistencies with real life, for example the red guy's clothes. This was what I thought when I first saw this short.
* This was really an exchange of concepts and data in a language not really suitable for humans to understand. So what you are seeing is not what actually took place, but a translation. Some machine took the abstract data interchange and translated it to what it thought would be more appropriate for a meat head to understand, including setting it up in an environment that would make sense to a human. But it made some mistakes (the clothes, the weird behavior of some characters). This could have predicted AI Video slop, in a way.
You're interpreting it overly literally. Cinema can be as abstract as theatre or the written word.
It was funny when they talked about meat sounds using meat sounds.
Plus for the story to make sense, they have to be seeing Earth from scans/sensors, and one of them must in fact not be familiar with Earth at all, having disbelief in what the other is saying. But if they are both there, in a diner, they cannot be as skeptical.
I get the constraints of short indie films, I love them regardless, but in this particular case it completely misses the mark.
You just have to go along with the idea that skin provides no indication of meatiness and that the two aliens are Ford Prefect types, then the short film lands just fine.
I guess. It's still hard to mesh with the idea they don't believe these humans flap their meat at each other, or that they do not communicate exclusively via radio signals.
It doesn't match my idea that these are two energy/mechanical beings discussing a faraway planet from their spaceship or whatever, talking theory without actually seeing the beings they are discussing.
You've never encountered, say, a baffling code bug that couldn't possibly be caused by X, spent a day on it, and found out it turns out to be caused by X?
Oh yes. But never dressed up as X! :D
More seriously, what you describe is partly the short story. The short film adaptation doesn't quite work for me, for the reasons I explained in other comments.
I like that the bearded one can't help cracking up when he says "the ones you probed": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg&t=285s
I'm a big fan of Tom Noonan (the character in red). He unfortunately passed away a few weeks ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Noonan
Oh No! Sad news! I missed hearing about it at the time.
I'm also a big fan. He's awesome in a bunch of things, but my favourite is Cain in Robocop 2. Such a great performance.
"Jesus had days like this. Hounded and attacked like a criminal. But like him, I don't blame you. They program you, and you do it"
"Frank. The Benzedrine's got my teeth wiggling. Cut it... Scopalomine, five mills per"
It's a good visualization but they skipped the punchline, which was the entire purpose of the story.
Yeah, I found this was definitely a case of "the book was much better than the movie", especially odd since most of the dialog was word-for-word, yet they skipped over the small parts that gave the story its lesson and relatability. Like the whole "officially or unofficially" part is one of my favorite parts of the original story, as it makes it seem like these intergalactic beings have to deal with the same concerns as Bob in corporate HR.
I think it highlights why the original text was uniquely brilliant and why it makes it reliably makes it to the top of HN every year or so.
Well said, thank you.
Agreed! I love the saxophone riff for the opening/closing song.
Also, funny to see Ben Bailey outside of a taxi cab.
That's Tom Noonan (who recently passed away) and Ben Bailey; one of the kids in the other booth we see briefly is played by Gbenga Akinnagbe in his first film role, who rose to greater prominence as Chris Partlow on The Wire.
Discarding scientific evidence usually looks differently than "we discussed that we didn’t liked it". Is is usually not looking at all, never starting a discussion, or even lacking an intellectual framework to comprehend the phenomenon.
See "The great silence" by Ted Chiang, http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/supercommunity/article_1087.p... for this "not looking at".
For this "beyond comprehension", think about Solaris Ocean, a mind (or non-mind?) we cannot relate to anything else. Or WAU from SOMA.
That short story makes me think of the kea (Alpine parrot) of New Zealand.
They're ridiculously smart and dexterous.
When I was a ranger I'd tell tourists to think of them as "monkeys who can fly... ...you're laughing, but I'm serious".
Their upper and lower beaks can move independently like a human's thumb and forefinger, unlike nearly all other birds, and they can also use their beaks like scissors, or to undo screws - that last one is very true, I'm not making it up, their upper beak makes for an effective flathead.
They share knowledge like corvids do, once one kea learns that the self closing door on your shop closes slowly enough, after a human enters, to give them time to get in, steal a chocolate bar and get out, there'll be five more trying it tomorrow.
They can undo zips on your backpack and then undo the latches on your lunchbox to steal your sandwiches, or they'll untie your bootlaces (yep they can undo knots) and remove them from your boots, or remove your tent pegs, or maybe cut your guylines, all of this just for fun.
There was a gang that would deploy one of their number at a viewing platform to act very engagingly and oh so photogenic to distract the tourists while its mates quietly stole interesting things from the hand bags, backpacks,and, if you left the door open, cars(!) of the tourists who were focused on the photogenic decoy putting on a show.
They had a bit of a penchant for passports during my time. Most of which were last seen being dropped into a deep and dangerous mountain ravine by a parrot that then let out a mocking laugh.
There used to be a gang of juvenile males that would deflate tyres at the local public toilets to prove they were tough - because the noise depressing a tyre valve made was scary, so the longer you pressed it, the tighter tougher you were, while your mates egged you on.
They also have distinct and recognisable facial expressions they use to indicate their emotions.
They've been taught to speak in the past - but the fact that they can survive, and indeed, they thrive, in the harshest environment in New Zealand is far more indicative of their intelligence than any Polly Wanna A Cracker would ever be.
> the fact that they can survive, and indeed, they thrive, in the harshest environment in New Zealand is far more indicative of their intelligence than any Polly Wanna A Cracker would ever be.
By this logic, aren't extremophiles the most intelligent beings? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile
"The Baby-Eating Aliens" also explores hypothetical differences in alien culture. It's also written in the same absurd conversational style.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469761
I really love it. I’m a bit surprised no movie student ever took a stab on it. It’s easy to produce, can be done in a meeting room with no windows.
That is one of the better reads of my life, and I'm a serious reader.
> See "The great silence" by Ted Chiang
I found this short story very moving. Of course, it's designed on purpose for this. But Chiang is usually so cerebral it caught me by surprise.
It is a very moving story. I can't help posting it as a comment when parrot and bird intelligence gets discussed on HN.
Previously...
They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43994603 - May 2025 (3 comments)
They're Made Out of Meat (1991) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38420111 - Nov 2023 (168 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=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)
Bisson once lived in the town just across the river from where I grew up and was an inspiration for me as a nerdy kid from the sticks who just wanted to write science fiction. His novels Talking Man, Fire on the Mountain, Voyage to the Red Planet, and Pirates of the Universe (don't be fooled by those last two titles; he was always undermining old sci-fi tropes) were among my favorites. This story is one of his goofier ones. I wasn't as big a fan of his short stories as they tended towards the jokey style of absurdism, but a favorite of mine is his "Bears Discover Fire."
This reminds me of a different short story I read somewhere that I, for the life of me, cannot find anymore. It's about aliens discussing earth (but they call it differently I believe) and how far they have evolved. They have 2 books/logs. One containing all life, and then another book containing all super intelligent life. They find out that earth already has some super advanced stuff, so they are deciding if it should move to the second log.
Does this ring a bell for anyone?
Silly Asses by Isaac Asimov?
https://www.contecurte.eu/2019/05/ecumene-silly-asses/
I made this ASCII visualization for the radio play of “They’re Made Out of Meat”: https://asciinema.org/a/746358
"We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”
Somebody recently recounted that they had been a convention of people who been 'abducted' by aliens. They commented that "Aliens certainly have a type".
Earlier I found it awe-inspiring. Nowadays I find it funny because we have yet to even remotely approach the complexity of meat.
It's amazing how consciousness remains a mystery given all the scientific progress over the last 100 years
Is it surprising? It seems likely you could build a complete working model of the universe with no provision for consciousness at all. As far as modern science goes, it's an intractable problem
You can do it with no provision for molecules too.
That wouldn’t be complete though. I mean that an outside observer could view a simulation of the universe by your model, down to the subatomic particle level, and find no differences with the real world. There is no measurable “consciousness field” as far as we know, so how can our science even begin to approach the topic?
It doesn't seem likely to me that in, just a couple hundred years, humans have developed such a thorough understand of every natural process as all that.
Consciousness had millions of years headstart. Give it time.
We don't know that.
Consciousness might have actually started today at 7am and, before that, we were all automatons without subjective experience of the world, just going through the motions.
You might say that's impossible, because yesterday you were conscious and you know that, but you can't prove it to anyone.
Epistemologically, this is not a problem that can be solved with "give it time".
Related: Carl Sagan's Cosmos resampled to make a "Meat Planet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP7K9SycELA
This American Life also did a good narration of this in Act 2 of episode 803 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803
Bad URL, but this YouTube clip works for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5usXhX0zaO4
good callout - https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803/transcript
Brandon Sanderson (very prolific fantasy author) has a novella inspired by this: * Original: https://www.brandonsanderson.com/blogs/blog/i-hate-dragons
* Extended: https://www.brandonsanderson.com/blogs/blog/i-hate-dragons-e...
This is fun to read but any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat, probably kept the original meat safe in a corner of the galaxy too..
The universe were quite uniform in character. Galaxies, stars, they are very predictable and essentially the same everywhere, across billions of years (both time and distance), can't see why that doesn't apply to life too in a general sense. Maybe different RNA building blocks and genetic chemistry, but probably work out similar to meat and organic stuff.
> This is fun to read but any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat
That does not follow at all. It's _likely_ that life elsewhere would be carbon-based since carbon is so useful and common. It is not a requirement. Silicon has been proposed as a replacement. While not as flexible as carbon, it's pretty close. Silicon-based lifeforms wouldn't be "organic" at all. Even if we just stick to carbon, there are many organic compounds (and lifeforms) that aren't anything close to what we would consider 'meat'.
We are working with N=1. Until we find more lifeforms elsewhere, we can't assume anything beyond basic physics and chemistry. RNA isn't a given. A lifeforms probably needs something that will pass along instructions to their offspring (in whatever form they take). It doesn't have to be RNA.
For a fictional description of a lifeforms that doesn't have RNA, DNA or anything remotely similar, I like to point out Blindsight, by Peter Watts. https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
> any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat
Perhaps it's predecessor was just advanced enough to build self-modifying replicators and fire them out into space. Eventually it hits a planet or asteroid and gradually becomes sentient and intelligent. No trace of how it originated.
Oh! good one. Here's a new twist:
1st generation stars seed the galaxies with carbon.
2nd generation stars are a sea of amino-acid comet soup. One bag-of-mostly-water lifeform evolves sentience. Its legacy is silicon intelligence, broadcast through the galaxy. It disappears.
3rd generation stars illuminate meat-based life, but it holds no novelty for the silicon travelers between the stars.
Thanks for doing a "well AKTually" on a piece of amusing fiction.
There's no refutation of anything here, I seriously thought about the possibility of evolution without meat, but you should be convince me otherwise if you can show me how it can arise naturally after big bang.
It's a discussion of reality stemming from an inspirational fiction. The whoosh apply to you.
Seriously...don't read any other science fiction stories. The things they write about that we can't indulge you by proving how they could possibly happen will make your head explode.
Edit: spelling
I think the point is that the story’s universe is populated by intelligent life forms that did not evolve from any lineage of meat. Hence the reference at the end to the hydrogen cluster.
The race of meat people are humans, though. So it's our universe.
It’s called fiction for a reason. Glad you’ve risen above that nonsense!
I personally hate that it implies there are faster ways to travel than light speed. We know this to be a hard limit in the physics of our universe and it rubs me the wrong way when SF writers just glaze over reality. Not to mention hydrogen life forms, what’s that about!?
I can relate. However. The unspoken rider is "...according to our current understanding". I don't think you have the footing to constrain the future to only what we understand today, especially since we can't reconcile our two most fundamental theories. I don't think you can do that even if you could explain quantum entanglement in terms of relativity.
On a separate note, science fiction isn't generally about science, imo, it's about human politics (Greg Egan being an outlier). The cod-science gives colour and setting. If you read it as stories about humanity, maybe the charlatanry won't irk you so much. I find this mindset helps me deal with my own irascibility.
You seem to be lacking in imagination.
I think they are abound in sarcasm :).
Things like star and galaxy formation/interactions are (relatively) straightforward, with fairly simple processes/mechanics at the heart of it. It's easier to predict on such a large-scale what's going to happen.
Things are far more complex on a biological level, which makes it harder to make generalized predictions. I see no reason to infer that life would only consistently evolve into organic life as we know it.
Why would it's predecessors need to be meat, besides for you own absence of imagination
I love this short story, it's one whose memory visits me unbidden from time to time. I blogged about it over 20 years ago[1], and it was already around 15 years old at that time. OMNI magazine was great.
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/retired/short-fiction-made-o...
Somehow this story isn't as fun today as it was when first printed ...
Was it ever "fun"? I always found it scary and depressing, in a good way, of course.
If you liked this check out 365tomorrows.com, they one such scifi story for each day of the year on rotation, quite similar in style, wit and length.
It’s a great daily snack, the constraints of Flash Fiction yield quite lean and punchy stuff.
Why is "They Were Made Out Of Meat" Hacker News favourite, but "Bordered in Black" is always flagged?
Gemini: In short, "They're Made Out of Meat" makes people feel smart and curious, while "Bordered in Black" makes people feel uncomfortable and argumentative—and on Hacker News, "uncomfortable and argumentative" is a fast track to being flagged.
Asking Gemini with the titles swapped will give you an equally confident story and reasoning about why "Bordered in Black" is actually preferred. This, and more, is why we're interested in what you have to say about the stories instead of what the LLM has to say.
What makes you a big fan of the story/reminded you of it here? I just gave it a re-read and thought it was alright. Not my favorite work of his... but certainly not bad either. Perhaps I've just read too many Sci-Fi stories to be properly shocked by the theme given the relatively short time to be immersed in the setting :).
Do you have an example of it being flagged? I only see one old post from 7 years ago (not flagged), and that links to a scribd pdf rather than the author's website
I suggest this vocal performance: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GggK9SjJpuQ
> It was incredible man. Mold on a rock that got to think. Ha, it was amazing while it lasted
By all accounts the CPUs we've made with ridiculous stuff like 2nm transistors is _surely_ more advanced than neurons, right? We just haven't figured out how to wire them properly :)
The 2nm claim is all marketing. The smallest features on these gates is much larger. For example, the gate pitch (what this measure used to refer to) on the 2nm process is actually 45 nanometers.
Neurons are insanely more complex, even if you disregard their electrical signaling entirely.
Nature's machines, for example, for reproducing DNA or for photosynthesis, are in a totally different league of 'precision engineering' to anything that our brightest engineers have ever created.
At times we get all giddy because we have invented a quartz clock, a wheel, a straight line or a calculator that seems to be better than anything in the world of nature, however, we sometimes have to overlook nature or forget to question why nature didn't evolve such things. With the clock, every cell in our body has some 'timing circuitry' tied into day/night cycles, seasons and much else. We just insist on doing it our way and proclaiming it better.
Counterpoint: biology looks like vibe-coding. I would hate to have nature as a colleague, she's an arrogant fool with a mail-order degree. I'd rather maintain a Jeep than a knee.
they are not
Is including an iFrame to Terry Bison's website reprinting?
Just wait a generation or two.
Not really a story but I feel this sort of belongs here: https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles...
I still remember seeing Terry do a reading of this at Lunacon, I think, shortly after it was published. It was a good reading, he really knew how to land a joke.
So, Link, it's all very straightforward and scientific if you just think about it carefully for a moment : we're made out of pixels.
Great short film version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg
I do wonder sometimes if someone out there is waiting for something actually intelligent to emerge down here.
If they exist, they're probably currently placing bets whether we will manage to destroy ourselves (or at least set our civilization back by centuries) with our nuclear weapons, our climate change or our social media...
I like the idea we live inside the Veil of Madness (A sort of galactic bermuda triangle that drives inhabitants insane, so all spacefaring civilizations stay away).
https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/8vbfgk/the_veil_of_mad...
Depends how they're listening I think.
There was a time not long ago when reportedly looking at the emails being exchanged around the world one would think the most pressing matter, discussed at length, was how to "enlarge your penis".
Think if the metazoans had written down their reproductive anxieties.
I upvoted because I didn't know the short film existed and it's interesting.
I think the short film completely misses the mark if both entities are there in human form, in a diner. (Of course, budget constraints, and the adaptation cannot just be two inorganic beings talking, but still...)
see also Stanisław Lem
The concept of "meat" presupposes the existence of carnivores, so it's hard to see how the realization in the story could ever have been surprising.
I like this story, but I never liked the wording "made out of meat", as if the word exists in a world without animals. I could have accepted "proteins", but that's not a catchy title.
I think that is what makes it great, because it makes it sound absurd.
If it was just talking about carbon based lifeforms it wouldn't land the same way.
They are clearly familiar with meat-based animals:
> “That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”
> “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they’re made out of meat.”
And indeed sentient species that are partly made of meat:
> “Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”
> “Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.”
I get your point but I don't think that those quotes establish familiarity with meat based animals. Familiarity with animals would be something like "yeah, sure, we know about that planet with cows but this is something else entirely!" (Also humans wouldn't be so surprising if they knew about things like cows).
Their references are not to creatures that are meat through-and-through but fictional alien races that have a kind of incidental relationship to meat that doesn't establish meat-based cognition as normal the way that animals would.
You have to read the story in the original eshidilii. It just sounds so illogical in English.
Maybe it’s lab grown in a future and not tied to animals in any way. Just for food.
The characters aren't speaking English. We are reading the author's translation into English and we have to trust the author's judgement.
Maybe this kind of thing isn't for you if the above is required explanation, though.
I think this story is tacky and doesn't really make sense. Do they already know what meat is? And if so, why do they act surprised when they find that lifeforms are "made" of it? Why even do they have an opinion on "meat"?
I find it good for a chuckle perhaps but there's nothing profound in here.
It has something to say if you compare it to the traditional arguments against the possibility of AI like Searle's terrible "Chinese Room" analogy - the point is arguing that computers can't possibly think because they are "just machines following programming" is a lot like these mechanical aliens believing that the idea of thinking meat is absurd.
I think you completely missed the point about the Chinese Room. The assertion wasn't that machines can't think or compute, but that they don't necessarily have any experience of the thing they are computing. We still have not the faintest idea where consciousness comes from and the Chinese Room thought experiment I think demonstrates this.
The problem is all this talk of "onsciousness" is vague. It's like "free will" -- it's just words, not a real objective thing that can possibly be studied objectively. It's just that people are vain. We wanted to believe we lived at the center of the universe (or at least our collection of planets) and Copernicus taught us otherwise. Then we believed we were of a different sort of being than the animals until Darwin taught us otherwise. True machine intelligence (although we aren't there yet) frightens us in a very similar sense.
The original formulation of Chinese Room deals with ‘understanding’. One supposes that understanding implies some form of subjective experience. I take OP’s use of ‘think’ to refer to an equivalent concept
This does what the best speculative fiction does, attempts to stretch and expand your understanding of the real world by presenting a provocative fictional reality.
The author is trying to get you to speculate on the kind of intelligence that would say this about humans.
> Do they already know what meat is?
Yes, they do:
> "“Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”"
What they cannot fathom is a sentient lifeform that achieves things but lives their entire lives as meat-based things, flapping their meat mouth parts to make disgusting meat sounds at each other. And I think they really never thought much about human reproduction!
As I’ve gotten older, it’s become increasingly hard for me to understand how anyone can read such comical reductionism as enlightenment.
We are infinitely complex arrangements of systems built upon systems, from the quantum properties of carbon atoms up through the proteins that make the “meat” we are so glibly reduced to, through the complexities and adaptations of mammalian bodies, up to the fearsome order of the human brain and the intricate sprawl of human society and culture.
To reduce us to anything less is to deny the awesomeness of the cosmos itself.
I don't know where you get the claims from "anyone" about "enlightenment".
This story is obviously satire. Meaning, it is a lie that tells the truth.
> This story is obviously satire.
Is it though? What is it satirizing? Is it satirizing the idea of water and carbon based life? How does that tell any truth?
It's a good question, because I would say it's mostly not satire. It's kind of making fun of the perspective of thinking meat is unimpressive, but that's not exactly a view held by anyone except in the fiction of the story. I think toward the very very end tonally it veers close to a satirical vibe but it's hard to put a finger on what about it counts as satire strictly speaking.
I think basically the humor is how unimpressed they are with a Sagan-style sense of wonder at the cosmos that is implicitly treated as the human perspective, how bleak it would be if true. The aliens ridiculing that is funny, and the actual bleakness of it is funny too.
> What is it satirizing?
I think it's (partly) satirizing how we feel about ourselves as the apex beings, and as explorers of the cosmos and colonizers. What if we are actually quite subpar, and the actual apex beings in the universe find us so unlikely and disgusting that they prefer to pretend they are not there, thus giving an answer to Fermi's Paradox? They don't want to conquer us, they don't want to have anything to do with us!
But of course, it's also satirizing this alien-as-a-bug idea, so common of early scifi, that the alien is a disgusting mess of antennae or simly appendages. What if we were disgusting to enlightened aliens?
What we can absolutely be sure of is that Bisson wasn't making fun of meat or the human brain, the thought that apparently irked the topmost commenter.
I thought it was satirising faux-intellectual SF short stories that try to seem deeper than they are. If it’s just an actual faux-intellectual SF short story, that’s much less interesting.
On this planet, we’ve found that basically anything can be used to perform computation, electronics (semiconductors, vacuum tubes), mechanics (linkages, gears, cams, steel balls) , pneumatics, photonics, electromechanics, electrochemistry, optoelectronics, chemistry, phonons, hydraulics, even collectible card games. Donald Trump has said many dumb things, but he was right when he said “everything is computer”.
And almost anything has been used to transfer information. Light (fire, smoke, electricity, heated wires, coloured flags, mirrors, lasers, bioluminescence, LEDs, discharge tubes, electric arcs), sound (vibrating strings, membranes, tubes of air in hundreds of configurations, explosives, blunt objects), chemistry, electricity, electromagnetic radiation, waving body parts around, burning pieces of dead tree to make coloured marks on squished pieces of dead tree, magnetism, scratching into rocks, circles of aluminium with tiny holes in them embedded in plastic, transistors, circles of vinyl with wavy grooves cut in them, pieces of paper with tiny holes punched in them, rockets, flares.
So the notion that any advanced spacefaring civilisation would be astonished by any form of creature or communication method given how much variety there is on this one planet is hard to entertain, even as satire.
> I thought it was satirising faux-intellectual SF short stories that try to seem deeper than they are. If it’s just an actual faux-intellectual SF short story, that’s much less interesting.
I think it's neither. It's a humorous scifi story. Bisson had a sense of humor (much like, say, Asimov also had one and wrote many humorous stories that you'd best not overanalyze!).
> So the notion that any advanced spacefaring civilisation would be astonished by any form of creature or communication method given how much variety there is on this one planet is hard to entertain, even as satire.
It may be hard to entertain, but the trope this is riffing on was very well established in scifi. Many people still think in terms of mankind exploring and conquering new frontiers, space included.
You're overanalyzing this. It's satire, a joke story.
Rainier Wolfcastle: THAT'S THE JOKE
Part of the human expression of disgust includes thought terminating cliches. Imagine how the average person would talk about a race of bug-like aliens, no matter how advanced they were. It would be a dismissive kind of 'ew, gross'. The humor is in seeing other beings reacting that way to us. I don't think it's supposed to imply the aliens are some kind of flawless geniuses revealing the true nature of human beings.
Sentient plants that move quickly would be another case of us humans going "WTF?!?!"
"They're made out of wires!"
"Oh god, you're right! They're all just tiny pieces of rubber and silicon, transistors and circuits all crammed chaotically together! How horrifying!"
How many of the billions of people alive have your perspective? How many of our leaders even, given the news in the last... let's say two weeks. But you can look at thousands of years of history and to me it still seems that people and their leaders don't share your view of "infinitely complex arrangements". I mean they might think such of themselves, but of "others", obviously not.
The story mentions some "official rules". Consider that we also have official rules and behaviour that does not obey them.
I dare suggest your own view might be reductionist.
I feel like the point of the story was that it was celebrating how spectacular the brain is, by showing how unlikely it would seem, and how incredulous another intelligent creature could be upon hearing of it if it weren't already built into their sense of normal.
It might be that this alternative cosmic sense of "normal" is not a real thing (meat may prove to be more cosmically normal than machine at the end of the day), but the sense of wonder in response to something as ridiculous as a brain, in its capabilities and its design, is a real feeling that the story is appropriately trying to evoke.
> As I’ve gotten older, it’s become increasingly hard for me to understand how anyone can read such comical reductionism as enlightenment.
First, it's a humorous piece.
Second, it's as much a critique of the aliens as of the humans. The aliens are also depicted as clueless about what makes human life interesting, and even shown to be petty in the end. Their behavior is entirely "human", so if they are criticizing humans for it...
> To reduce us to anything less is to deny the awesomeness of the cosmos itself.
Teacher: "Photosynthesis makes energy from water, CO2 and light. The mitochondria are the power centers of the cell."
Grade-schooler: "How do they work?"
Teacher: "Um. Um..."
Modern scientist: "Quantum entanglement and tunneling. We don't really understand any of it."
You must be fun at parties.
It's comedy. You might not find it funny, but it's rather small-minded to suggest that no one else could find it funny.
Do you feel the same about cows and pigs and chickens? One way to read this is your reading. Another way to read it is as an attempt to make you question the concept of meat.
Well, actually, probably not. If you say we're made out of meat, you end up with the hard problem of consciousness.
I'm imagining a purple cube in this moment. Is the purple cube made out of meat?
Of course not.
If you put two stones in the ground, they define a line. It goes through the center of mass of both stones and extends towards both sides through the universe.
Now remove the stones.
Does the line stop existing? You can still "see it" in your brain. It could be argued that the line has always been there. That the stones were just a marker. A means for an idea to manifest in the physical word. You could put any two other markers at any point on that line and they would represent the same line.
The idea that "the cube is made out of meat" is akin to saying that "the line is made out of stone". Ideas always exist, their representation in the physical world don't.
Your sense of consciousness is just one of those representations. It is "immortal", just like the line is. In principle it could exist without the physical substrate that is your brain, or in a different substrate. Probably there's a way to encode all of that into a big number.
I think this is where the idea of an "immortal soul" comes from. It is however kind of easy to misinterpret it, especially if one is a mesopotamian sheperd who explains the world with gods and religion.
It's electrical signals... Inside your meat
So the power grid is having experiences? Computers too?
This is the funniest possible place attempt to open a hard problem of consciousness conversation, but also fitting because it makes it as ridiculous as I feel it actually is.
On another level even this clarification kind of misses the mark because many/most versions of the HPOC still treat physical substrate as a necessary condition, just not a sufficient one, sometimes will appeal to radio receivers, or the mental and physical being two aspects of the same underlying thing (sometimes called neutral monism). I personally think that view is mistaken and deeply confused, but even so, it's a view that ties consciousness to the substrate of "thinking meat" without reducing it, and would probably be a moot point from the aliens perspective.
Where does the simulation happen inside a computer.
The hard problem of consciousness isn't.