They're Made Out of Meat (1991)(mit.edu) |
They're Made Out of Meat (1991)(mit.edu) |
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.)
Most of what we are is actually none of our doing. Most of our discoveries are incidental (including in medicine, we don't know how many of our drugs work for example), and we're clearly unprepared to live in the world we ourselves created, hunched over keyboards in claustrophobic offices or locked up at home.
We're not an advanced species, our society is in-between a "colony" and "multicellular organism" and more and more of our advancements are created by computers for computers. We don't understand a lot of how an AI works, it trained itself, we just did back propagation and observed the prediction error get smaller over time.
Similarly today CPUs are designed by software written on the previous CPUs, machines are engineered on machines, and so on. The digital civilization is bootstrapping itself and eventually might leave the cocoon.
Saying other forms of life won't have parts that self-maintain to a degree is quite odd, because it's logically impossible. You see if you are not made of semi-indendent parts, you become extremely fragile. What exactly you think is the alternative? This is not about silicon vs carbon or analog vs digital. It's more about basic logic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54wpdvZNve4
>Seeds of Monotropa uniflora - a plant that parasitizes fungi - are incredibly tiny. And they can afford to be, because all they need to grow is to be able to germinate on a mycelial thread of the mycorrhizal fungus that they parasitize.
8:22> "Mycoheterotrophic Lifestyles of the Lewd and Depraved"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myco-heterotrophy
>Myco-heterotrophy (from Greek μύκης mykes, "fungus", ἕτερος heteros, "another", "different" and τροφή trophe, "nutrition") is a symbiotic relationship between certain kinds of plants and fungi, in which the plant gets all or part of its food from parasitism upon fungi rather than from photosynthesis. A myco-heterotroph is the parasitic plant partner in this relationship. Myco-heterotrophy is considered a kind of cheating relationship and myco-heterotrophs are sometimes informally referred to as "mycorrhizal cheaters". This relationship is sometimes referred to as mycotrophy, though this term is also used for plants that engage in mutualistic mycorrhizal relationships.
So just in case, we should jail most of our animal farmers/slaughterhouse workers as well?
We jail animal abusers based on a real-world idea of "pre-crime". (Unmotivated animal abuse strongly correlates with unmotivated violence against humans. For this same reason cartoon child porn is also illegal.)
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 :)
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
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
Maybe they have encountered organic life before, but since it hadn’t invented radio they didn’t realise it was sapient, or even sentient.
I does though. Electric current in general doesn't compute, but electric current in a computer does compute. Thus electric current has a property of computation depending on what it's used for.
We already know the answer to this and it is no, it is not a pre-requisite unless "sentience" is itself an emergent property of intelligence. Hutter's mathematical formulation of an optimally intelligent agent (AIXI) is not computable but approximations of it are, that is to say super-human intelligence IS just a computable function (as human intelligence is resource bound and suboptimal) with no extra "sentience" required. The only limiting factor at this point is the computational resources to compute this function, with the resources we have now it is still at the "toy" stage: playing noughts and crosses and Pac-Man etc.
People used to think that "creativity" was required for playing chess... clearly those people had not heard of Minimax.
And the very strange not-for-everybody-but-definitely-for-me TV adaptation.
Hah!! There's _two_ of us! ;-)
Okay, now I might actually try to make "that really cool jacket" from S2. (you know what I mean)
And I didn't think they could possibly follow up that first season with something equally weird without becoming repetitive, but they managed it.
We Puerto Rican parrots have our own myths. They’re simpler than human mythology, but I think humans would take pleasure from them. Alas, our myths are being lost as my species dies out.
That's the only fictive part of the entire work.
It's just so lazy to change the premise of something without that change having any meaningful impact. What makes the statement by the parrot different from if it were from a human? Nothing whatsoever, and that's why this is a bad "story".
A disembodied paragraph that I've transmitted to you can appear to be intelligent or not, but it only really matters in the sense that you can ascribe that intellect to an agent.
The LLM isn't an agent and no intellect can be ascribed to it. It is a device actual intelligent agents have made and ascribing it intellect is equally as erroneous.
I'm not convinced it's even possible to come up with a principled, non-circular definition of intelligence (that is, not something like "intelligence is that trait displayed by humans when we...") that would include humans, include animals like crows and octopuses, include a hypothetical alien intelligence, but exclude LLMs.
I'm not arguing that LLMs are intelligent. I'm arguing that the debate is inherently unwinnable.
almost precisely the same assertions could be made about you with precisely the same degree of justification: you aren't an agent and no intellect can be ascribed to you. you are a device unintelligent agents have made and ascribing you intellect is equally as erroneous
an intelligent agent would have recognized that your argument relies on circular reasoning, but because you are a glorified autocomplete incapable of understanding the meanings of the words you are using, you posted a logically incoherent comment
(of course i don't actually believe that about you. but the justification for believing it about gpt-4 is even weaker)
Do you know what gives rise to consciousness? If not how can we be sure it doesn't arise from a giant pile of linear algebra?
Honest questions by the way in case they come out snarky in text. I'm not aware of a single, agreed upon definition of intelligence or a verified test that we could use to know if a computer system has those capabilities.
That may be, but I think today's tweet from Yann LeCun succinctly sums up the differences in capability between our wetware and LLMs
Yann may touch in how we define intelligence elsewhere, I haven't deeply studied all of his work. Though I can say that OpenAI has taken to using relative economic value as their analog for comparing intelligence to humans. Personally that definition is pretty gross and offensive, I hope most people wouldn't agree that our intelligence can be directly tied to how much value we can produce in a given economic paradigm.
The universe is a min-consciousness/min-decision optimized supercomputer. This is demonstrated by quantum eraser and double slit experiments. If a machine does not distinguish upon certain past histories of incoming information, those histories will be fed as a superposition, effectively avoiding having to compute the dependency. These optimizations run backwards, in a reverse dependency injection style algorithm, which gives credence to Wheeler-Feynman time-reversed absorber theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%E2%80%93Feynman_absorb...
Lower consciousnesses make decisions which are fed as signal to higher consciousnesses. In this way, units like the neocortex can make decisions that are part of a broad conscious zoo of less complex systems, while only being burdened by their specific conditionals to compute.
Because quantum is about information systems, not about particles. It's about machines. And consciousness has always been "hard" for the subject, because they are a computer (E) affixed to memory (Mc^2.) All mass-energy in this universe is neuromorphic, possessing both compute (spirit) and memory (stuff.) Energy is NOT fungible, as all energy is tagged with its entire history of interactions, in the low frequency perturbations clinging to its wave function, effectively weak and old entanglements.
Planck's constant is the cost of compute per unit energy, 10^34 Hz/Joule. By multiplying by c^2, (10^8)^2, we can get Bremmerman's limit, the cost of compute per unit mass, 10^50 Hz/Kg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremermann%27s_limit
Humans are self-replicating biochemical decision engines. But no more conscious than other decision making entities. Now, sentience, and self-attention is a different story. But we should at the very least start with understanding that qualia are a mindscape of decision making. There is no such thing as conscious non-action. Consciousness is literally action in physics, energy revolving over time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_(physics) Planck's constant is a measure of quantum action, which effectively is the cost of compute..or rather..the cost of consciousness.