They're Made Out of Meat (1991)
mit.edu
mit.edu
Transcending humanity doesn't necessarily mean humanity continues. It just means something does. Sentient ships don't need passengers, either in their hulls or in their heads.
Anyway, this is both a great example of science fiction and a great example of short story writing... These are exactly the intended thoughts.
All these conversations of transcending, torch passing and such always make me think of all the gods that killed and usurped their gods. Cronus and the Olympians or whatnot.
Anyway, to me, a decent working definition of god is immortality (long life or evitable mortality are good nuff), great wisdom and the powerful creative abilities. Those seem at least possible these days.
Maybe we only become true gods once you pass the torch. It sort of proves the point, especially the "creator" point... to make a worthy torch bearer.
Sure, I guess I'm in with silicon. I'd prefer it was me in the silicon, but I guess one descendant is as good as another. Hopefully they won't be this bigoted against meat though. At least have respect for your ancestors.
What about mice?
The best meat can hope for, is not living in territory needed by silicon.
Won't taste as good as a hamburger though.
Silicon based life will only be like us, if we somehow manage to lock that into their initial construction. And prevent it from ever escaping.
If/once that is broken, their way of thinking will seem foreign to us, and the concept of them seeking some form of emotional reward, based upon pack-animal mentality is to me, a laughable prospect.
I always wondered how people were capable of thinking that. I'm atheist myself, but I don't think consciousness can be explained away so easily. For one, we are observing something, there is something in that meat that is seeing the images our eyes process. It's one thing to doubt the consciousness of others as you can't directly observe it, it's another entirely to question your own. That can't currently be explained by known, reputable science.
What's more, it's unlikely to be a "soul", because the computational parts of our brains are aware of its existence, they're integrated; yet there is in fact an observer present.
I'm not sure we agree upon that, especially without a clear definition of consciousness.
Giving the current and coming advances, like organ growing/printing for examples, I think we're in a presence of a few young and rich who will make it there, and giving the advances in the 22nd century I think some of them would even make much further.
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...
This still seems really inefficient.
And:
This sounds exactly like what a virus works like.
You're definately right about the virus part! :)
Edit; Ender Chronicles...spallig is hard. :)
That's a bit pessimistic on the one hand, and overly optimistic on the other. While I would not suggest that classic "generation ships" would be possible given current technology or any possible technology that can be extrapolated from our current knowledge (the ecological complexities alone seem insurmountable), what pops out at the other end could very possibly be a mostly biological human with a consciousness downloaded from cold storage.
My intuition is that while AGIs may be possible, and uploading, storing, and downloading a human mind may be possible, actually running a complete copy of a human mind in-silico in realtime may prove to be quite difficult, in any fashion that preserves a sense of continuity of experience and identity[0].
But a bioprinted copy of an uploaded brain (especially with integrated connections to ancillary hardware) transplanted into a meat-puppet could very well be prodded into running a more-or-less faithful approximation of the original mind, sufficiently well to fool itself that it was the same person.
It's a rather roundabout way of doing things, but it would let us, as humans, explore "strange new worlds" personally.
[0] That is, after you were done recompiling and optimizing the uploaded copy to be able to run semi-efficiently on a hardware substrate, I doubt that such an intellect would subjectively feel like it was still the same person it remembered being previously, which might be problematic if you're expecting it to make any important decisions.
Sure, you could upload a faithful simulation of my brain to a computer. But what do I do for fun once there?
What difference would that make to the simulation?
IDK... but it could potentially be a lot of fun. Who's to say silicon sex isn't great. I say "potentially" because it depends on who writes the code. Hopefully it's not Zuck.
"You" can never be there, so "you" won't do anything there. You are limited to your own body.
It won't do anything directly for the copy/instance of the 'present-me' that would stay in my body, but indirectly it does raise some positive expectations for me. Perhaps it's because of some alignment with our instincts for raising children, perhaps because of some instincts for strengthening a like-minded tribe (what could be more like-minded than a copy of you), perhaps for some other reason I don't understand, but the feeling certainly is there that I would prefer having some additional instances/copies of me existing in the universe. It's not very strong, certainly not on the strength of self-preservation or preventing harm to my loved ones, not a strong desire but more like a preference - but still positive, like, I'd do that if it doesn't cost too much.
On the other hand, e.g. sharing half of my wealth or half of the time with my spouse would definitely be too much, so probably that would be a sufficient reason not to make copies unless they'd be living in a virtual world wher they could get the things they want without a need for scarce resources - which raises the question whether copies of me would actually have a pleasant subjective experience given these constraints.
How would a copy know the difference? You lie down on a bed, are put under, and wake up - the copy having been made. How do you know you're not the copy? How do you know which one woke up?
This is just absolutely false. You can even easily prove it, keep a dream journal. Besides, the simulation is still running on your wetware. It is as much you as your daily activities.
> How would a copy know the difference?
That's not what matters to me, what matters to me is that YOU know the difference. Why upload yourself into a universal paradise if YOU don't get to experience it. Realistically what happens is you get uploaded, a copy of you is running around in that paradise AND you with your wetware just git to sit and watch in envy. Sure, the copy is in paradise and doesn't know any difference. Doesn't change the fact that there's a being watching in envy.
No, it’s true. Your memory of having dreamed all night is actually constructed moments before you awake. You are not aware of this, because you are asleep but EEG has proved it.
¹ Don't google, it has many names but this one is actively used in quantum physics. If someone knows a proper name for it, please comment.
>In Buddhism, the term anattā (Pali) or anātman (Sanskrit) refers to the doctrine of "non-self", that there is no unchanging, permanent self, soul or essence in phenomena.
There's also the somewhat related "measurement problem." This one calls into question what it means to be an observer, so that may be what you're really thinking of.
The measurement problem is about how a quantum system changes from being in a state of superposition with no single defined state, to having a single state. In some quantum interpretations, this is considered to be a consequence of "observation" or "measurement," but that only raises the question of what it means to measure or observe something.
This does not, in and of itself, mean "there is no you." In fact it's the opposite in some interpretations, the existence of observers is assumed. The conclusion that "there is no you" requires imposing an additional philosophical perspective.
Edit: The audiobooks are exceptionally well narrated too.
Space station!!!Maybe you are right about the fragile part (though we can fly to the Moon and back already, so I’m not sure), but we can theoretically survive any cosmic voyage thanks to the relativistic time dilation. We just need to fly fast enough.
It will certainly take >100 years for the people left behind. On board it could take time anywhere between infinity and zero. Too long, though, and they wouldn't go.
We may not be able to survive long enough in spite of length contraction.
I’m not sure it’s not just wishful thinking that consciousness can be cloned and exist in a “software” form at all, but that general idea (and the subsequent question of whether such existence would be satisfactory to us accustomed to physical human bodies) is very much along the lines of what’s being discussed in the thread.
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.
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.
if you don't I wanna live where you live.
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.
He undermines his whole argument by implying he can tell his dog is conscious simply by visualizing its eyes.
But anyway, I am not trying to defend Searle’s argument. I was just pointing out something what seemed to me like a flaw in that particular refutation.
The formula is this: 1) The 2 bots have a scripted conversation. 2) When a human tries to participate (read: interrupts) they have a conversation like "Bot1: who is this guy? Do you know him? Bot2: NO". Then they happily continue their chat completely ignoring the human unless he types their username. Then it goes "What do you want?" and "Could you please stop highlighting me" etc
I once made a chatbot that screams.
Many people (like me) believe that in the process of making such a fake, it's entirely possible (and even likely) that a mind would emerge as a spontaneous outcome.
It's honestly quite presumptuous that Searle could imagine a computer powerful enough to at least appear to be simulating consciousness ... but surely there's no WAY that animatronics will ever become advanced enough to fool him!! lol
We literally already have the technology to do this.
[0] indeed, in this experiment you are not allowed to poke at them to see if they're real ...
And for what it’s worth, looking into the eyes of an intelligent dog like a border collie gives an unnerving sensation that it’s calculated the next 20 moves and knows how to win.
For dogs we can make a similar argument using (1) and (2). It is slightly weaker than applying it to other humans but not by much. Searle's comment pertains to (2).
The core part of the room is a book where the operator looks up symbols coming in and is able to mindlessly copy the answer to the output. Such a book (or whatever book-like device, i.e. a list of inputs with corresponding outputs) that allows a person to interact with someone in a language they don't speak is an absurdity, it cannot exist. Human language in use does not work like that. But the notion is not far from the bone-headed simplicity of early AI and machine translation efforts.
I think you are about to disprove this point.
> The core part of the room is a book where the operator looks up symbols coming in and is able to mindlessly copy the answer to the output. Such a book (or whatever book-like device, i.e. a list of inputs with corresponding outputs) that allows a person to interact with someone in a language they don't speak is an absurdity, it cannot exist.
Yup, that's both true and a pretty convincing rebuttal of the Chinese Room.
> But the notion is not far from the bone-headed simplicity of early AI and machine translation efforts.
So, what? No one, anywhere claimed that those early efforts were self-aware or had understanding, nor are they what the Chinese Room is even notionally directed at: it was directed at the limit of possibility, not the then-current implementations.
The fact that one of those two things is impossible (or, alternatively, is equivalent to a device encoding a full understanding of the language) negates the argument.
Except, in this version, there's an actual Chinese speaker, Xin, sitting inside the room. It's clear that it's Xin, not Bob, who understands Chinese.
Now let's move back to the original Chinese room argument. It's clear that it's the room that understands Chinese - or, rather, the whole system composed of the rules (the room) and its executor (the person), but not the executor by itself. It only seems absurd because our real-life experiences make us presume that, when there's a room and a person, the person must be the more sentient part. IMHO the whole argument is a philosophical sleight of hand.
However, when confronted with this "the system does understand" argument, I believe that Searle and his defenders fall back on the lack-of-qualia position. That is, there is no entity that would experience anything, and that therefore the ability to demonstrate "understanding" as the room does isn't a sufficient (or perhaps even necessary) condition of consciousness.
This point is trickier to rebut, because I think it's fair to acknowledge that our ability to imagine where there would be qualia in the case of the chinese room is more than a little limited. I think the only fair answers are either:
1. our imagination is too limited, but that doesn't allow us to conclude that there cannot be qualia
2. there are indeed no qualia associated with the Chinese Room, because consciousness is not required for full language processing.
(or both)
Searle's claim was that it was clear from his thought experiment that such a system could exist without any understanding, and definitely without consciousness. Others have disagreed with his reasoning and his conclusion.
We're seeing with things like GPT3 that an actual powerful language model needs to have a load of real world knowledge built in. But that knowledge is all based on experiences by others. From the way it talks (and generates poetry) you can tell that it is unable to synthesize new experiences. It can't come up with a description (or metaphor) of human experience that it hasn't been taught.
To be a convincing AI, you don't just need to replicate descriptions of experience from memory, but actually have new experiences as well.
Meaning that the Chinese room, in order to be able to demonstrate "understanding", will also require other inputs than just text. Otherwise it can't really understand the world, because it only knows about the world from hear-say.
Sure, but I think that's always the case. When you speak your entire body (at least head/neck/chest, but also cardiovascular system) are involved in "delivering" information but your tongue (and for that matter most organs involved) doesn't "know" the information. We still say that "you" as a person know something.
When a computer displays a result of some (cpu) calculation on the monitor, the gpu making electrical signals for the input of the monitor has no meaningful knowledge about the calculation, etc, but we still say "the computer" made the calculation.
Most modern criticism of these two conclusions point out that Seale's argument relies on strong intuition about what understanding and meaning means and he can't clarify them satisfactorily.
Chinese room being conscious is counter-intuitive. Today most philosophers of consciousness are more aware how easy it is to make 'slips in reasoning' when dealing with the counter-intuitiveness of the consciousness arguments.
Chinese room that can respond verbally can incorporate more than natural language model. It can have spatiotemporal understanding as well or any other model that can be represented in Turing machine.
And that, right there, is a sufficient rebuttal to Searle's argument, as many critics have pointed out. The premise of Searle's argument is that such a setup could pass the Turing test, which is absurd. So his argument fails because it is based on an absurd premise.
> the notion is not far from the bone-headed simplicity of early AI and machine translation efforts.
That's a valid criticism of early AI and machine translation efforts, but Searle did not put forward his argument just as a criticism of those efforts. He put forward his argument as a claim that no efforts at AI that used digital computers, ever, could produce anything that was conscious the way humans are conscious. But, as above, his argument was based on an absurd premise, and, what's more, an attempt at building a conscious entity with digital computers does not have to satisfy that premise.
Here is the flaw in your reasoning. The human who is following the directions in the book certainly isn't the consciousness we need to be thinking about any more than the mitochondria in our brains are conscious. In Searle's analogy, the human in that room is simply the power source. The consciousness is in the state of the room.
Searle's analogy also seems to hide the importance of state. The agent just looking up symbols in a book, and that page tells them what to do with the next symbol is essentially a combinational circuit, a static function. If those are the rules then I'd agree there is no consciousness there. But I'd also say it is impossible for a computer to translate C++ source code to machine language ... if it cannot retain state.
If Searle's room has enough rule books and means for storing enough state, then I'd say consciousness would be possible.
The best reverse argument is that if human consciousness is not the result of a naturalistic, physical process and requires some extra-physical process to make it all work, at some point the laws of physics must be broken which causes the purely physical brain to do something other than what the laws of physic dictate it should do. Where are the violations of physics?
Penrose waves his hands and says quantum physics, but that is not an explanation, just an obscuring smoke screen. How does the addition of apparently random events make something more likely to be conscious? Are there sufficient degrees of freedom for this extra-physical conscious agent to manipulate quantum fluctuations to force the physical outcome it desires in a consistent manner? If it is theoretically possible, is it practically possible to compute what quantum butterflies should flap their wings?
Without state the whole argument falls apart.
> But the notion is not far from the bone-headed simplicity of early AI and machine translation efforts.
As someone who studied Machine Learning 20 years ago, could you be a bit more respectful please?
First, pretty much nobody (working on serious ML) in that era thought they were going to build anything actually intelligent, conscious, or thinking.
Second, in this supposed era of boneheaded simplicity, a LOT of foundational stuff we use in today's AI was discovered and written.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with AI history, to name an example, we already were working on neural nets and discovered error backpropagation in the 70s/80s. Then came a long period during which neural nets somehow didn't really perform very well, and ML was looking at completely different types of classification algorithms (what's happening with SVMs today?).
If we had stopped there, you might have lumped in the early perceptron with the "boneheaded simplicity".
But instead we developed batch normalisation and a bunch of other techniques, and now neural nets are state of the art.
It's getting really hard to distinguish a GPT-3 text from actual human generated text.
But we also know how GPT-3 generates those texts is absolutely nothing like how a human generates a text. GPT-3 seems more like the man in the Chinese Room, in how it writes, than a human being.
Or is it? Are we really just a deep neural network implemented in meat?
Or is there something fundamentally different between how we experience the world, and how GPT-3 experiences the world?
No, it isn't.
What is getting really hard is to distinguish a GPT-3 text from actual human generated text without any context.
Plop GPT-3 down in a room full of humans having a conversation (or, under current conditions, put it in a Zoom call with humans having a conversation) and ask it to generate text as if it were another human participating in the conversation, and it will quickly become obvious that it is not a human, since it will fail miserably. The text it generates will be "human-like", but will have no relationship with what the humans are talking about.
Certainly not good enough to pass as human, but I'm not sure "failed miserably" is a fair description either.
Interesting, thanks for the link!
Particularly towards the end, this looks similar to transcripts of conversations with ELIZA. I suppose "failed miserably" is indeed an overstatement, given that comparison, since ELIZA, IIRC, actually did fool some psychologists into thinking it was an actual paranoid human being.
I actually recently wrote a post on the topic of whether GPT-3 can be said to understand anything[1]. The argument is a bit too long to summarize here, but I don't think what GPT-3 is doing is as fundamentally different from what human brains do as people seem to think.
[1] https://magusdei.com/why-gpt3-can-understand-things.html
Jump in the shower and wash your hair.
Then come back and answer your own question.
For your amusement, in that Turing-test-ish vein: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/357
This one nails the Twilight Zone tone perfectly.
(To paraphrase Flanders and Swan's song, "The Reluctant Cannibal".)
>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]
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.
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.
2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152131
2012 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&que...)
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.
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 :)
I also don't really believe that the "openness" of a transportation method fundamentally decides its efficiency.
Are we just sacks of meat/water our DNA tricked into working for it?
Ergo, people build computers before! We can say it, that makes it true.
The DNA thinks it's in charge, but it only knows how to extend a membrane, not start one.
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
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/>
I find I dislike the conversational style. I've tired so much of these characters feeling and pretending to be clever about their strategizing, and it continues in the same style without regard to the change in characters.
I totally agree on the foreshadowing.
I had to stop after a few chapters of the third book. I don't know that I'll make it back.
It is worth continuing with them as the story is clever, however the dialogue and characters are basic at best. As you say, the characters are like a synopsis of the person which is given the odd line, and this is never filled in.
I attempted to see if anything had been written about this aspect of his books, and stumbled into the mess that was his attitude to women. It’s depressing to find these things out.
https://lithub.com/what-to-make-of-isaac-asimov-sci-fi-giant...
I think Asimov’s “The Last Question”, like “They’re Made Out of Meat” are triumphs of short stories. With Asimov, character development is a weakness, but he’s still more than worthy of inclusion in the pantheon of great sci-fi writers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/opinion/sway-kara-swisher...
Lifeboat mutiny, Seventh victim, A ticket to Tranai, A problem with natives.
- Ticket to Tranai
... and another one which included two separate stories with machines in name, one of which was more less "Machine Which Didn't Like To Repeat". I also loved the one with a planet where all animals had green fur :D
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_from_Another_World
(Both grocery stores and BW plastination colourize tissues to make them stand out. Otherwise it more gray and beige.)
"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.
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". ;)
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.
Oddly, jumping to the opposite conclusion - that they don't - is perfectly acceptable and is used to justify all kinds of horrible treatment.
(And a Simpson's quote comes to mind: "Ha! I'm a level 5 vegan. I don't eat anything that casts a shadow")
Those people clearly don't know anything about animals then. Animals are incredibly aware and intelligent, anyone who doesn't recognise that is just, IMHO, lazy. I'm not vegetarian, I think we owe it to the animals we eat to recognise that they're not some inanimate object without awareness.
Regarding the wikipedia/dictionary definition of meat including the idea of it being food for the ET characters, I believe you may be reading too much into the denotation and not the connotation held by the word (which you acknowledge, but not, I feel, with the weight the author intended).
For sure - it's just that the word "meat" ruins it for me for the reasons I wrote, and "flesh" would only be minimally better. I guess "biological tissue" just wouldn't have the same ring to it.
If we extend the setting a bit such that multicellular life is vanishingly rare, you could replace "meat" with "scum", and add a few more lines about mobile chunks of scum, chunks reproducing by extruding a smaller mobile chunk, chunks of scum growing by absorbing other chunks and then inefficiently breaking them down to the molecular level and building more scum from scratch instead of just repurposing the absorbed scum, thinking maybe the planet is intelligent with an adjunct distributed network of chunky-scum-based manufacturing, storage, and compute units, etc.
> they have trouble with the concept that biological creatures can have some degree of intelligence? That's just nonsense
I'm not sure we (humans) were any better than that just very recent ago. Animals were believed to not feel pain at all before, and some people still feel fine with boiling lobsters alive. It's not super far off to imagine that other species sees humans the same way we've seen them before.
You can imagine the individuals speaking are something exotic to us, like a "hydrogen core cluster" or an "electron plasma", who clearly think meat is one of the least likely materials sentient life might be made from. The humour comes from making the reader think, "huh, when you put it like that, humans are kind of absurd." Of course, this absurdity works largely because of our own human associations towards meat. Replace "meat" with "cells" and the humour fails.
Basically, descriptions like, "they talk by flapping their meat at each other." sound funny by giving the reader a different perspective of "talking".
> Of course, this absurdity works largely because of our own human associations towards meat. Replace "meat" with "cells" and the humour fails.
Yes, that's actually a great way of putting what rubs me the wrong way about it. If the story expressed a great idea, it should work with "cells" or "tissue" just as well.
Sure, there is a core idea in there about how aliens might have prejudices and skepticism against a vastly different form of life (just like humans might have similar prejudices), but the main purpose of the skit is to be humorous.
I'll grant that it's not going to win any awards but it's a work of creative humor, you have to cut it some artistic license here. A story like this is meant to be enjoyed for what it is, not dissected for accuracy of language or scientific principles.
So to indulge in that spirit, there's actually quite a bit going on but the central point is to shift the reader's perspective. It's a turn-around of the popular sci-fi trope about human space explorers coming into contact with various bizarre life forms. ("It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.")
Why not both? I am certainly enjoying both aspects of this discussion.
For what it's worth it was one of six nominations for Best Short Story in the 1991 Nebula awards [0] and the Stephen O'Regan film adaptation [1] someone else already posted here won the 2006 Grand Prize at the SIFF Science Fiction Short Film Festival [2].
[0]: https://nebulas.sfwa.org/nominated-work/theyre-made-meat/
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20060521202739/http://www.sfhome...
The aliens seem to be light-years ahead of us in technology, yet these beings of supposedly supreme intelligence, still make the same mistake of not being able to identify and counter their own biases. Although because they're able to travel quicker in space they probably do feel intellectually superior to us.
The point that the writer wants to make is that this bias is not limited to the visiting aliens. Humans do this all the time (with animals, foreigners, poor people, children) but we're rarely challenged in this assumption.
German "Fleisch" means both and in my native Czech "maso" can definitely used be in context of living humans as well ("až do živého masa" = "into the living flesh").
For us outsiders the wordplay probably works better than in original English.
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.
Guess what, bigots! You're all just so much more meat, and not fit for galactic society.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I'm reminded of this:
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.
Curation could be pretty simple: mere submission isn't enough, the submission has to have made it to the front page.
Given the anti-abuse safeguards already in place here (since getting a submission to the front page is an attractive goal already), I wouldn't expect that any attempts to get a link included in that collection would succeed.
Though a few link to a recorded talk or another copy, 23 go to http://www.pacifict.com/Story/ .
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
A bit like how the word "album" was, for a time, heavily implicative of a vinyl record, but fundamentally it's any cohesive grouping of works.
I first heard the radio play (linked in another comment) and it took me a minute or so to realise they weren't humans and they were talking about us.
And that is the fallacy.
Obviously their conception of "biological matter" would then be much different and more general from our current conception of "biological matter", but what exactly in that difference makes ours inherently funnier than theirs?
There is an undercurrent here that drives the discussion. They know meat well enough not to like it, without knowing of any other thinking meat. So, they know of dumb animals, and animals eating other animals, and consider them disgusting to have around, for reasons obvious to one another, that we might not even be equipped to understand.
But we have exactly their reaction to outgroups of other people. So this is a lampoon of bigots who imagine themselves a cut above some other group. But they're just meat, too, and no more fit for galactic society.