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.
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
hvsm bsjsf sldsqh fch tcifhssb
It's absurd to expect self-awareness in some system just because its parts are similar to the parts of other self-aware systems you're familiar with.
The Made of Meat story was quite a nice counter argument to that.
In any case, being non-organic, it's not clear where they might have gained such contemptuous familiarity with organic matter- although it's clear from the story that they know about it much less than they think.
That xenophobic aliens are choosing to ignore us because of inherent differences.
This is how discrimination would look like if you're on the receiving end without your knowledge.
To flip it around, it is equally absurd to say computers can't be sentient because they're just math, or just minerals and electricity etc.
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.
- Ew!
By weight we’re mostly made of inorganic molecules.
That's sort of a "house special" at the Gene Wolfe fine writing establishment - his characters use the words expectable for their time and circumstances, and the reader has to work it out to the contemporary context.
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)
[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 :)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
But this is the first time I’ve seen The Egg, thanks for that.
Now that you reminded me, I submitted a story that Russ Cox mentioned at the end of his post discussed a month ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38020792
It's "Coding Machines" by Lawrence Kesteloot, January 2009, and it has a lot to do with Cox's piece, Running the “Reflections on Trusting Trust” Compiler
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...
https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.htm...
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.
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.
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
Invidious link: https://invidious.askiiart.net/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg, https://yewtu.be/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GggK9SjJpuQ&pp=ygUZVGhleSdyZ...
It makes me smile each time.
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.
"Hyrdogen core clusters" might be around a bit longer
On a related note, it would be curious to see how many years a computer could keep chugging along silently doing its job. Of course dependent on a reliable power supply and that We stop our habit of breaking all dependencies every three months. Maybe thousands of years would be possible? A bit interesting to think about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5usXhX0zaO4&ab_channel=Podcl...
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.
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...
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080725045740/http://www.solari...
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.
The host of cash cab starred in this enactment of this script.
This recent New Yorker profile and interview is a great read.
«
Terry Bisson’s History of the Future
For more than two decades, one of pulp sci-fi’s masters has delivered headlines from a time line defined by the absurd.
»
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803/greetings-people-of-ear...
It reminds me of Friendship is Optimal
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal
the owner has apparently passed away.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonglobe/name/david-...
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).
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.
Also people: "AI will never be as intelligent and capable has humans are"
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.
What would you expect from meat.
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.
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/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGh...
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?
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.
Culture is illogical. If it was logical, it wouldn’t be culture.
Farming animals is not sociopathic, it's a business decision based on economic interest.
This works because animals don't have human rights. (Obviously.)
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.
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.
How about an EV car which is powered exclusively by solar panels, without any battery, noticed what it has in common with plants?
There are more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of by your botany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotropa_uniflora
(You don't make software from scratch from sand and electricity, you use an off-the-shelf CPU and existing libraries.)