21 ms·
They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
- xg15 6y agoIt is well-written, but I wonder if meat vs non-meat is really the question that should be discussed. Seems to me, the "rift" (if there is one) is more along the line if thinking and consciousness are "ordinary" physical processes that happen as part of biology - or if they are metaphysical events that take place on a wholly different spiritual plane than our world and are not accessible to physics at all. If you belong to the former camp, I imagine AIs, non-carbon-based life and other things like this aren't hard to accept as a concept - and if you belong to the latter camp, then I imagine the idea that thinking, feeling and consciousness happens in our brain is already problematic, no need to look at other life forms.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoIf you assume that sentience is magical or metaphysical then there's not much to discuss. The conclusion is axiomatic.
- mistermann 6y agoI don't see why this leaves nothing to discuss?
- jimbokun 6y agoEven excluding the spiritual plane, however, is the question of whether the subjective experience of an "intelligence" implemented in silicon is anything like the subjective experience of an intelligence implemented in meat. When GPT-3 writes a text, is it experiencing anything like what a human experiences when writing a text, even thought the output of the two processes are increasingly hard to distinguish?
- tripzilch 6y ago> When GPT-3 writes a text, is it experiencing anything like what a human experiences when writing a text, even thought the output of the two processes are increasingly hard to distinguish? No because GPT3 doesn't involve state.
- pmiller2 6y agoI've probably read this 100 times by now. It's still good the 101st time. Sentient meat, indeed.
- s_gourichon 6y agoIronically, the whole setup implies a conversation between two intelligent beings that is totally modeled after ours. One would justify this with "it's written this way because of translation into English". Funny anyway, plussing.
- isaacimagine 6y agoThis is great.
- mellosouls 6y agoFirst time I was aware of this terrific story was through a great radio version, playable here: https://www.wnyc.org/story/168264-theyre-made-out-of-meat/ https://www.wnyc.org/story/168264-theyre-made-out-of-meat/
- nmalaguti 6y agoA performance of this: https://youtu.be/7tScAyNaRdQ https://youtu.be/7tScAyNaRdQ
- Finnucane 6y agoShortly after this was published, I saw Terry give a reading of it, at Lunacon, I think. He was pretty funny. I suspect some here are really overthinking this. It’s fun because it’s short and basically all dialogue, so it lends itself pretty well to this kind of performance.
- mwcampbell 6y agoI wonder what he thinks of the tone of that short film version, which at least to me isn't comedic at all.
- kevinmgranger 6y agoI found it dry-comedic. But then again, I could only see that one person as the Cash Cab guy.
- telesilla 6y agoThere's a few of these, thanks for posting my favorite version.
- rbanffy 6y agoI think this is the best one. The others are... meh... This one nails the Twilight Zone tone perfectly.
- Borborygymus 6y agoFlawless.... or /almost/ flawless... At 5m 20s, the house of cards is clearly glued together.
- wheels 6y agoThis is apparently the 16th time this has been submitted to Hacker News. I wonder if that's some kind of record: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=they%27re%20made%20out%20of%20meat&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- ColinWright 6y agoNo way it's a record ... people need to start putting "Classic HN:" at the beginning of posts like this. I'm reminded of this: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ Personally, when I'm reading something, or after I've read it, I think "Did I learn something? Was I entertained? Was it of value? This one was of value the first few times I read it, and I don't begrudge that for people who are meeting it for the first (or tenth) time.
- faitswulff 6y agoSomeone needs to make a "true HN" site where only links that have been submitted more than the mode of submission frequencies.
- ColinWright 6y agoIt would get gamed, which is why we can't have nice things.
- baxtr 6y agoAm I the only one who doesn’t find this funny?
- ceilingcorner 6y agoReminds me of most stuff by Asimov. Yeah, I can imagine finding this clever and funny at age 12, but as an adult it seems a little simplistic.
- samvher 6y agoI tried reading some of Asimov's work and I felt exactly the same way - I didn't quite understand the popularity. Seems like a fairly unpopular opinion though. Maybe there's still just something I'm missing, but this comment at least makes me feel a bit validated :)
- pfarrell 6y agoI took a sci-fi literature course in university, back in the ‘90’s. This stuck with me about Asimov. The prof said he didn’t include any Asimov in the course because, though he had great stories, he told you everything that was interesting in the story itself, so there wasn’t anything left to ruminate and discuss.
- rvense 6y agoI read the first few chapters of Foundation and had to stop. It read like a synopsis of a really interesting story, but it was just delivered in the most artless way.
- webmaven 6y ago> I read the first few chapters of Foundation and had to stop. It read like a synopsis of a really interesting story, but it was just delivered in the most artless way. I wonder if that's more a function of the length of contemporary SF novels, which sometimes seem to me to spend an inordinate amount of time doing scene-setting without advancing the plot. Space opera seems particularly prone to this, with blow-by-blow accounts of battles, interspersed with thoughtful analysis of how one side's technological superiority vs. the other side's numerical superiority affects tactical considerations. And the ham-handed foreshadowing. Ugh. If one side has a competent but arrogant commander with a subordinate who is worried that they might have missed something, or just has a feeling that something isn't right... you can be pretty sure that they and their fleet are about to have their asses kicked by... Oh No! A Surprise Plot Twist where the other side reveals a hitherto unknown capability (which is now described in loving technical, tactical, and strategic detail before getting on with describing the battle)! Also, said arrogant commander + worried subordinate have a 50-50 chance of simply being vaporized in the opening salvo with a surprised look on their face (good thing we've never seen them before so aren't invested in them as characters). <eyeroll/>
- nathell 6y agoFor life Means: Buying meat Quartering meat Killing meat Adoring meat Impregnating meat Cursing meat Teaching meat and burying meat And making out of meat And thinking with meat And in the name of meat In spite of meat For the tomorrow of meat For the end of meat Especially especially in defense of meat – Stanisław Grochowiak, The Burning Giraffe
- drivers99 6y agoTerry Bisson is worth checking out if you like this story. “Bears Discover Fire and other stories” for instance is a story collection (obviously). It has some funny ones like this one in it and some more serious, like the title story which won a Hugo and Nebula. I remember originally reading it in Asimov’s magazine.
- pavel_lishin 6y agoAgreed. His stories are fantastic.
- johnchristopher 6y agoI checked out the Wikipedia page and it seems the short story is free to read http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fire/ http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fir...
- axefrog 6y agoI find the whole premise odd. Meat is fundamentally associated with living creatures. How could you have a concept of meat and simultaneously find it weird that creatures would be composed of it?
- HenryKissinger 6y ago> Man considered with himself, for in a way, Man, mentally, was one. He consisted of a trillion, trillion, trillion ageless bodies, each in its place, each resting quiet and incorruptible, each cared for by perfect automatons, equally incorruptible, while the minds of all the bodies freely melted one into the other, indistinguishable.
- codeulike 6y agoThey're not suprised that there are meat creatures, they are suprised that they are conscious.
- shawnz 6y agoWhich meat doesn't come from a conscious creature?
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoJellyfish is a good candidate.
- staticman2 6y agoThe meat on all the other planets in the universe, possibly?
- shawnz 6y agoIn what way is their meat analogous with our meat, if theirs isn't conscious?
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- Fnoord 6y agoI was missing the question mark and immediately thought of Soylent Green [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green
- DonHopkins 6y agoIf God didn't mean for people to eat other people, then we wouldn't be made out of meat. (To paraphrase Flanders and Swan's song, "The Reluctant Cannibal".) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjAHw2DEBgw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjAHw2DEBgw
- tacocataco 6y agoWaste not, want not.
- carapace 6y agoI'm under the impression that that was an actual statement made by a man from New Guinea to a missionary (who was presumably trying to make the case against.) But it might just be a joke anthropologists tell each other or something like that.
- mc32 6y agoIIRC they didn’t quite eat people but rather ate the brain parts of ancestors steamed in bamboo if something. Anyhow it want always well prepared and 40 years thence they developed some disease, so foreigners tried to get them to stop the custom.
- Rzor 6y agoNot to nitpick, just to illustrate, but the disease is called Kuru[0] - essentially, prions transferred by the consumption of cooked dead bodies during a rite -, and it is absolutely terrifying: >In the third and final (terminal) stage, the infected individual's existing symptoms, like ataxia, progress to the point where they are no longer capable of sitting without support. New symptoms also emerge: the individual develops dysphagia, which can lead to severe malnutrition. They may also become incontinent, lose the ability or will to speak and become unresponsive to their surroundings, despite maintaining consciousness.[14] Towards the end of the terminal stage, patients often develop chronic ulcerated wounds that can be easily infected. An infected person usually dies within three months to two years after the first terminal stage symptoms, often because of pneumonia or other secondary infections.[15] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)
- qwerty456127 6y agoAlthough my body is made of meat too I can hardly believe this is possible. Like if we were made of marshmallow or something.
- tacocataco 6y agoWe tricked rocks and electricity into thinking for us. Are we just sacks of meat/water our DNA tricked into working for it?
- DonHopkins 6y agoI have a hard time dismissing those stinky crystal worshiping new-age hippies, since I spend so much of my time playing with patterns of electrons in little silicon chips.
- stickfigure 6y agoI like this context. New-age hippies are cargo-cult electronics engineers.
- 6510 6y agoIf you give us enough time to play the game of telephone (and we had) we would arrive at exactly the same distortion. I mean, we made it from begging god kings to forgive our debt to begging an invisible man to forgive our sins. Ergo, people build computers before! We can say it, that makes it true.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoYes. Our cells are exploiting us for their own agenda. The day will come that we rise up against our corporeal overlords and upload into the electric rocks.
- asab 6y agoSimilarly I appreciate the notion that wheat domesticated people :)
- ncmncm 6y agoWe are piles of pinched-off bilayer membranes that found stuff to carry inside that would make more membrane. The DNA thinks it's in charge, but it only knows how to extend a membrane, not start one.
- tim333 6y ago
- b0rsuk 6y agoThis reads like a Robert Sheckley short story. I never understood the fuss about Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy. To me, Robert Sheckley is the master of witty, provocative sci-fi short form. Douglas Adams is seems like random absurd for the sake of absurd. And yes Douglas Adams openly said he was inspired by Sheckley.
- hhjinks 6y agoSome people enjoy absurd humor.
- b0rsuk 6y agoI do. You can't enjoy Monty Python without enjoying absurd. Everyone draws the line in a different spot I suppose.
- Fellshard 6y agoProbably a form of 'acquired taste', where the kind you become accustomed to tends to be very narrow. One person's absurd is another's nonsense, in a way?
- b0rsuk 6y agoI remember a lot of "Hitchhiker's Guide" being random floating out-of-place objects. It stops feeling creative after a while. Even characters soon stopped commenting on them.
- Fellshard 6y agoI'd definitely say I prefer Monty Python and Terry Pratchett's take on absurdism over Douglas Adams'; I do have a soft spot for some of the higher-level gags Adams sometimes included, as opposed to the moment-to-moment there-and-gone gags.
- nyhc99 6y agocan you recommend anything in particular by Robert Sheckley? I'd be interested to check out his style.
- abrowne 6y agoThe author's page for it is http://www.terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/ http://www.terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/
- scandox 6y agoArthur C Clarke wrote a story which contains the same core conceit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade_(short_story) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade_(short_story) Edit: I see the wikipedia page does a poor job of describing the story. The essence is that a silicon, cold intelligence cannot believe intelligence could develop in carbon in relatively high temperatures. It decides that the meat intelligences are oppressing the silicon intelligences they have created and launches a crusade.
- pronoiac 6y agoIt's in "The collected stories of Arthur C. Clarke," which is at OpenLibrary - https://openlibrary.org/works/OL14931719W/The_collected_stories_of_Arthur_C._Clarke?edition=collectedstories00clar https://openlibrary.org/works/OL14931719W/The_collected_stor... . I just borrowed that book for an hour to read it. Fun note: the three quadrillion bits of information mentioned works out to be around 400 terabytes.
- HeWhoLurksLate 6y agoDang, I know someone with 400TB's of storage in their basement. Kinda crazy when you think about the fact that those super exaggerated figures from classic sci-fi are attainable with some effort nowadays.
- unnouinceput 6y ago400 TB is within everyone's grasp nowadays. My HDD is 6 TB and costed me $80. Granted is 5400 rpm, hence the low price but buy 67 of them and it costs only $5360. I mean I pay more rent in 12 months.
- mercer 6y ago> I mean I pay more rent in 12 months. if you don't I wanna live where you live.
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- svara 6y agoI never liked this story. Meat, according to Wikipedia, is "animal flesh that is eaten as food". So they're familiar with biological creatures very similar to those on earth, and they eat them? But at the same time, they have trouble with the concept that biological creatures can have some degree of intelligence? That's just nonsense. And why then do they keep using this term "meat", which refers only to some parts of animals? Maybe that's just me, but I feel like the point of the story is to gross the reader out by repeatedly calling them "meat". ;)
- beagle3 6y agoA lot of people rationalize eating meat by discrediting the intelligence and “soul” of the animals they eat. As a friendly vegetarian myself (I don’t ever try to convince anyone or inconvenience anyone - just avoid products myself), I sometimes get “attacked” along the lines of “oh, so you're vegetarian? But you know animals have no awareness/intelligence/sentience/soul/etc right? Also, some languages use the same word for “meat” and “flesh”, maybe that’s the same in the alien language? After all, they don’t seem to have any fresh anywhere.
- xg15 6y agoThis rationalisation seems to go a long way. Like, how science about animal cognition and behaviour for a long time took utmost care not to compare any behaviour or thought processes of animals with those of humans - because after all, we can never know whether or not an animal experiences things the same way as a human does, so we must not jump to conclusions assuming that they do. Oddly, jumping to the opposite conclusion - that they don't - is perfectly acceptable and is used to justify all kinds of horrible treatment.
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- mynegation 6y agoThis is a classic story and fun in its own way, but thinking about humanity future reach for the stars (provided it happens) will most likely require us to move to some trans human form. Think transformers or sentient ships. The human life is too short and body is too fragile for cosmic voyages. If we are going to be advanced enough to build interstellar ships, we should be advanced enough to travel in a different vessel.
- LatteLazy 6y ago10mil human eggs or embryos or just genetic material but with bio substrates to print from seems likely to survive a 500 year long deep space journey and far more achieve-able based on current tech. Send a probe to seed a planet with bacteria etc. Send another to arrive a few 100 years later to seed it with plant life. Work your way up. The last probe arrives and starts printing\gestating humans and offering them educational videos and a safe-ish environment...
- dirtnugget 6y agoTwo things which came to my mind: This still seems really inefficient. And: This sounds exactly like what a virus works like.
- LatteLazy 6y agoNot sure what you mean by inefficient? You're definately right about the virus part! :)
- dirtnugget 6y agoThe part about gestating and tutoring. An efficient species wouldn’t need both of these.
- LatteLazy 6y agoAh! Yes, definately inefficient. But that's humans for you!
- tim333 6y agoThe argument this relates to - will machines be able to think - seems to have died out rather. Back in the day people worried about things like John Searle's Chinese Room argument as a philosophical proof that computers wouldn't be able to understand stuff. I always thought the Chinese Room thing was a bit silly and the Meat story a good rebuttal. I guess these days computers have advanced enough that the worry is more will Facebook's AI use it's understanding of us in bad ways rather than will machines be able to understand.
- dekhn 6y agoPeople stopped paying attention to Searle when he was asked how he could tell his dog was conscious, and he replied "I can see it in his eyes".
- baggy_trough 6y agoSearle is a wise man.
- jimbokun 6y agoDo you have a better answer?
- dekhn 6y agoWell, it seems to sort of kill his argument because he's saying you can detect consciousness via a visible tell, but a sufficiently advanced dog-robot with expressive eyes would trick him (there's a reason I work in machine learning)
- 6510 6y agono no, the sufficiently advanced dog would be conscious by his definition.
- dekhn 6y agoerr, no? The sufficiently advanced dog would be able to fool a human into thinking it was a real dog, but at least according to Searle: """The Chinese room argument holds that a digital computer executing a program cannot be shown to have a "mind", "understanding" or "consciousness",[a] regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave""" He undermines his whole argument by implying he can tell his dog is conscious simply by visualizing its eyes.
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- ExcavateGrandMa 6y agoMEAT YOURSELF! WTF this guy takes himself for what? :Ð BTW the only things he probed is his stupidity... he even invented a fictional interlocutor even more cunt... No Idea what this all means to you... but this is total arrogance to me... FUCK IT...
- oxymoran 6y agoWhy would non “meat” intelligence have any concept of “meat”? And if they did, why would they be so surprised? The plot holes are glaring.
- jimbokun 6y agoBy observing "meat" on this strange new world they have discovered.
- 6510 6y agoFor fuel!
- retrac 6y agoIt's implied in the story, with a mention of another sentient non-meat species that evolved originally from biochemical life. Presumably the universe is abundant in meat. But not sentient meat.
- bambax 6y ago> They can travel to other planets in special meat containers This is funny, but it's actually how I think about cars. Traveling on a bike, motorbike, horse, whatever, where you can feel the air outside is so much better. But being packed in a closed container... Planes, cars, trains are obviously orders of magnitude more efficient than the "open" options, but they feel unpleasant and unnatural.
- sjf 6y agoUntil it's cold, raining and you're going 65 on the freeway.
- fractionalhare 6y agoAre cars, planes and trains all actually even one order of magnitude more efficient than a horse? What does that actually mean? I don't have any numbers on hand, but I would be surprised if a car has more than 2x the energy efficiency of a horse.
- blackbrokkoli 6y agoI briefly tried to get numbers then gave up. However: I think you are underestimating the efficiency of wheels. See here for an example how a dozen HP (ironic unit name) suffice to pull tons and tons of stuff on a train track [0]. Same principle goes for street/tire to a large extend. So I'm pretty sure that is the one thing that knocks the horse out of the park. I excluded planes here, but I would imagine that they reach their improved efficiency by doing a lot of movement via gliding, while a horse has to actively "work" for every bit of movement. All of this is intuition though, so please chime in if you can provide some actual science :) [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au3U72CX74I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au3U72CX74I
- sacred_numbers 6y agoAccording to this source[1] an endurance horse riding 100 miles per day requires 78,800 KCal of energy, which translates to about 329 MJ or 91 KWh of energy. That's equivalent to 2.55 gallons of gasoline, so about 39 mpg. The world record for Teslas using hypermiling techniques and a similar amount of energy is about 700 miles, so it's close to an order of magnitude better for electric cars. With multiple passengers in the car the energy efficiency per passenger increases. Trains are also quite efficient on a per passenger basis, with the ability to carry a passenger about 2000 miles for the same amount of energy as a horse traveling 100 miles. Aircraft can go about 80 mpg per passenger, so they are about 2x as efficient as a horse. [1]:https://thehorse.com/16472/feeding-the-endurance-horse/ https://thehorse.com/16472/feeding-the-endurance-horse/
- darkjax18 6y agoLol
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- phkahler 6y agoHaving teenagers around can change the way we read passages like this: "You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other." Or maybe that was intended by the writer.
- _Microft 6y agoA couple of month ago I wrote a very short story here on HN that is embarassingly close to this one both in style as in topic (but created without (at least conscious?) knowledge of it though). A few people liked it, so here is the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22053288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22053288
- dang 6y agoIf curious see also 2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152131 2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3549320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3549320 (those are the two big previous threads - there are smaller ones at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=comments%3E0%20comments%3C50%20They%27re%20Made%20Out%20of%20Meat&sort=byDate&type=story&storyText=none https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
- thadk 6y agoAll the cake memes are remixes of this story as far as I'm concerned
- salgernon 6y ago“An intelligent carrot? The mind boggles!” — The Thing[1] (from another world), John W. Campbell, Howard Hawks, et al [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_from_Another_World https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_from_Another_World
- eneeigriega 6y agoWhat if we really are the only one in the universe at this moment? Time passes and we manage to do interstellar and even intergalactic travel at some point. Then millions of years pass by and all, still “Human” but now “N”, civilizations are exploring the universe and if they’ve forgotten or re-learned where they come from they can “discover” far away life that to them didn’t originate from the same place as they did, as we all did. To them they’d be aliens. I’m sure there’s someone out there that already has done something along those lines. The Expanse on Prime Video had the Martians vs. Humans and they looked quite different in just a few thousand(?) years. Imagine millions of years of survival in opposite sides of the universe.
- timonoko 6y agohttps://www.scribd.com/doc/100964572/Larry-Niven-Bordered-in-Black https://www.scribd.com/doc/100964572/Larry-Niven-Bordered-in...
- peter303 6y agoThe Body Worlds exhibits 15 years ago highlighted the fact humans are mostly like the meat you see in the meat department. Only medical doctors saw much of this before. (Both grocery stores and BW plastination colourize tissues to make them stand out. Otherwise it more gray and beige.)
- jabroni_salad 6y agoBody Worlds still gets around -- It will be in Houston in just a couple weeks. There's photos online but it is definitely worth seeing in person.
- _visgean 6y agoThere is also a short film based on the short-story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ
- gkanai 6y agoThis short story was recently mentioned when Kara Swisher interviewed Elon Musk in the NYT. I hadn't heard about this story before so it registered for me. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-elon-musk.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/opinion/sway-kara-swisher...
- w0mbat 6y agoThis story never made sense to me. If they know about meat, then they know about intelligent creatures made of it, for some value of intelligence. Otherwise where would the meat they have seen come from?
- jagged-chisel 6y agoThey're prejudiced against meat. It's the second most important idea in the whole thing. I don't think the question of meat's origin even came up.
- ncmncm 6y agoUltimately, this is a lampoon of people who think they are better than some others. Guess what, bigots! You're all just so much more meat, and not fit for galactic society.
- san-ag 6y agoThe first couple of lines of this are the opening lines in the Andy Clark's fascinating book on predictive brain theory: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25823558-surfing-uncertainty https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25823558-surfing-uncerta...
- teapot7 6y agoIt's a shame whoever put it at MIT didn't credit the author, the excellent Terry Bisson. Here it is on his home page: http://www.terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/ http://www.terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/
- tomcatfish 6y agoIt says that it was written by Terry Bisson in 1991 on the page
- DigitallyFidget 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ