They're made out of meat (1991)

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.

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 didn't really get it to be honest. I feel like something went over my head.

The short film makes no sense, as the 2 people talking are meat themselves.

It's a good visualization but they skipped the punchline, which was the entire purpose of the story.

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

Agreed! I love the saxophone riff for the opening/closing song.

Also, funny to see Ben Bailey outside of a taxi cab.

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

> 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's amazing how consciousness remains a mystery given all the scientific progress over the last 100 years

Bad URL, but this YouTube clip works for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5usXhX0zaO4

Thanks for doing a "well AKTually" on a piece of amusing fiction.

> 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.

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.

Why would it's predecessors need to be meat, besides for you own absence of imagination

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!?

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.

they are not

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 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'm sure this account has been compromised (or this was the posters plan all along) and they're posting spam links now.

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.”

Maybe it’s lab grown in a future and not tied to animals in any way. Just for food.

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.

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

Where does the simulation happen inside a computer.

The hard problem of consciousness isn't.

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.

Rainier Wolfcastle: THAT'S THE JOKE

"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!"

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.

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.

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.

> 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."

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.

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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.

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!