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Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> What is it satirizing?

Being provincial. Assuming sentients look and act like us, whoever "us" is. (Cf. whales, or elephants.) Assuming that what "we" do is the right, proper way to do things and anything else is inferior.

> 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...

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?!?!"

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.

"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!"

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.

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.

> 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.

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