[HN Gopher] They're Made Out of Meat (1991) ___________________________________________________________________ They're Made Out of Meat (1991) Author : mailarchis Score : 346 points Date : 2023-11-26 08:36 UTC (14 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.mit.edu) (TXT) w3m dump (www.mit.edu) | myko wrote: | I love this video adaptation: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ | joeblubaugh wrote: | The director uploaded a higher-quality version a few years ago! | | https://youtu.be/T6JFTmQCFHg?si=2j3-ctWbT7IXaZKj | stavros wrote: | Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be much higher quality, | it's a bit more contrasty and less washed-out, but that's it. | gpvos wrote: | I love that one too, but sadly it leaves out the final few | lines which make the piece so much more poignant. | maxverse wrote: | Past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737993 | ndsipa_pomu wrote: | BBC Radio version: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00yyz3b | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: | This feels very shallow and wrong. | | 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). | timeon wrote: | > This feels very shallow and wrong. | | What would you expect from meat. | gizajob wrote: | It's even typing its complaint in digitally encoded binary. | Even when using our codes it's still thinking with its meat | fingers. How beastly. | pixl97 wrote: | How dare it mock us so. | CPLX wrote: | "This science fiction would never happen in real life!!" is my | favorite kind of comment. | zdragnar wrote: | It is a personality trait I identify with, made more stark | because my wife is quite the opposite. | | 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. | drowsspa wrote: | As a (former?) physicist, I very much prefer to try to | imagine what would need to be changed in our rules so the | presented world would be possible, rather than "ok I accept | this little change but everything else has to work as close | as possible to our own universe" | Vt71fcAqt7 wrote: | Agreed. In this case we could infer that perhaps members | of this alien species are either not all super | intelligent, not super knowledgeable or at least not | super knowledgeable in all areas. In this case, however, | the the usage of "meat" here is intended to be a | commentary on humanity of some sort. If the idea is that | "aliens would just see humans as meat" then I do in fact | think that point is somewhat diluted by GP's comment. | "Meat" is not really an accurate word here, unless we | take it as it's broader meaning of "food"[0], at which | point "food" itself would be a better word. | | [0]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meat | otabdeveloper4 wrote: | The answer is pretty obvious - building this intricately | organized matter from scratch out of sunlight and elements is | extremely inefficient, much better to recycle the existing | bulding blocks of lower levels of organization. | | (You don't make software from scratch from sand and | electricity, you use an off-the-shelf CPU and existing | libraries.) | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: | Most of the meat consumed is not used to build things but is | consumed by the body for energy. | otabdeveloper4 wrote: | Protein is used by the human body as construction material, | not as fuel. (It is possible to use protein as a fuel | source, but virtually no modern human follows a diet where | that actually happens.) | aatd86 wrote: | What's matter? | krallja wrote: | Nothing, what's matter with you? | 3cats-in-a-coat wrote: | You think an advanced species would be surprised that we're | made of what we consume? Quite a funny take, because there's | literally no other option. | | 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. | | Those three don't belong together in any way. Yet here we are. | wavesbelow wrote: | > Those three don't belong together in any way. Yet here we | are. | | 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/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhc | Gh... | teddyh wrote: | > _we also exhibit odd and illogical cultural trends_ | | Culture is illogical. If it was logical, it wouldn't be | culture. | lo_zamoyski wrote: | Huh? You don't understand what culture is. The study of | logic itself, science, philosophy, etc are all part of | culture. Culture is a shared heritage without which you | would still be cracking nuts open with rocks. | otabdeveloper4 wrote: | Not illogical at all. A person that abuses animals is a | potential menace to society - lack of empathy means they | might easily abuse humans too. We are punishing sociopathic | tendencies here. | | Farming animals is not sociopathic, it's a business decision | based on economic interest. | | This works because animals don't have human rights. | (Obviously.) | hutzlibu wrote: | "lack of empathy means they might easily abuse humans too" | | So just in case, we should jail most of our animal | farmers/slaughterhouse workers as well? | 3cats-in-a-coat wrote: | You need to let this one simmer down and see how it is | self-contradictory. | wruza wrote: | 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. | | These inconsistecies are a hint that you may approach it from | the wrong side. 4 contains a hint on that. | pixl97 wrote: | >You think an advanced species would be surprised that we're | made of what we consume? | | 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? | 3cats-in-a-coat wrote: | Our sample size is way more than one actually, maybe if we | just abandon the superficial concept of "advanced". For | example the way insects organize in a colony and your cells | organize in a body and humans organize in society is | identical bar some circumstantial distinctions. When a | principle comes about, reinvented independently so many | times, we as intelligent beings need to realize "hey maybe | that simply what it's like in general". | | 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. | dist-epoch wrote: | Noticed something that all plants have in common? | | How about an EV car which is powered exclusively by solar | panels, without any battery, noticed what it has in common with | plants? | bigbillheck wrote: | > all plants have in common | | There are more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of by | your botany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotropa_uniflora | DonHopkins wrote: | Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't: The Tiniest Seed in the | Blueberry Family | | 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 mukes mykes, "fungus", | eteros heteros, "another", "different" and trophe 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. | vidarh wrote: | We can assume from the descriptions that while they've come | into contact with beings with meat or meat-like structures as | part of them, they've never encountered intelligent beings made | of meat. And so they necessarily can't know all that much about | the possible states of meat. So your "surely" is canonically | wrong. | | 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. | Finnucane wrote: | Meat doesn't understand satire. | gosub100 wrote: | > They would wonder why we didn't just use the abundant | sunlight and elements to power ourselves | | 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. | latexr wrote: | > This feels very shallow and wrong. | | 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. | pixl97 wrote: | People: "How dare this short story underestimate what aliens | could imagine" | | Also people: "AI will never be as intelligent and capable has | humans are" | surprisetalk wrote: | Andy Weir's _The Egg_ is another excellent short story: | | [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 :) | | [2] https://bookshop.org | munchler wrote: | God's Debris is by Scott Adams, not Douglas. | surprisetalk wrote: | Thank you! What a silly slip of the fingers | | 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. | sandworm101 wrote: | Most everything in modern sci-fi is connected to either | Hitchhikers or the doctor. Writers put jokes and references | to them in nearly everything. | fknorangesite wrote: | And its sequel _The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul._ | | And the very strange not-for-everybody-but-definitely-for- | me TV adaptation. | loxias wrote: | > 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) | AnimalMuppet wrote: | Douglas Adams actually wrote a few Dr. Who episodes. | neaden wrote: | Yes, the first Dirk Gentley novel was based off a cancelled | Dr. Who project called Shada, which I believe was recently | released as an animated special. | jtagen wrote: | Jesus. This story is like a train. You know it's coming, then | it hits you. | gcanyon wrote: | Ted Chiang is a genius, and pretty much everything he writes is | magnificent. "Exhalation" is ridiculously good. "Understand" is | probably my favorite. | ndsipa_pomu wrote: | "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling" is an excellent | short that is entirely available online - for those who don't | yet appreciate his talent | | 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... | edanm wrote: | I love Ted Chiang, and "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of | Feeling" is maybe my favorite of his stories. Certainly the | one I think about most often. | causality0 wrote: | I generally like Chiang's work and its derivatives but that | was... kind of terrible. It felt like you told a government | PSA writer to do sci-fi, except it isn't really sci-fi. | It's an essay which posits that parrots are sapient and our | failure to recognize it means we won't recognize alien | sapience, and also wiping out parrots is bad. It's an | if/then statement that stops at the if. | notnaut wrote: | The entire overarching genre is often called speculative | fiction, so your description of it is sort of accurate. | Writing would be in a sorry state if the only stuff that | got put out had to answer its own questions. | x86x87 wrote: | Strongly agree. I have yet to run into a story written by Ted | that I do not find amazing and through provoking. | timetraveller26 wrote: | The Egg is one of my life long favorite histories. kurzgesagt | did a video animation of it a few years ago | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI | colordrops wrote: | Check out the short story The Jaunt by Stephen King. Serious | existential terror. | nmca wrote: | If you enjoy darker/harder sci-fi "Axiomatic" is a great | collection by Greg Egan. | caskstrength wrote: | Early Egan is excellent. Permutation City is one of my | favorite novels. | js2 wrote: | _They 're Made Out of Meat_ (21 submissions) and _The Egg_ (33 | submissions) seem to be the most frequently submitted short | stories to this site: | | https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... | | https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=galactanet.com | zeristor wrote: | I've seen They're Made Out of Meat, posted several times. | | But this is the first time I've seen The Egg, thanks for | that. | soufron wrote: | Ahah just read The Egg after reading your comment... great | advice! Loved it! Thank you! | phlakaton wrote: | Add to that "Thang" by Martin Gardner (yes, _that_ Martin | Gardner, you Scientific American old-timers). I read it in an | Isaac Asimov-curated short story collection once upon a time | and it remains one of my favorite short-shorts. | satori99 wrote: | _Harrison Bergeron_ by Kurt Vonnegut, is the short story that | always comes to my mind when I think about this type of | thing. | edanm wrote: | So wonderful to see Smullyan recommended here! | | 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 | grammers wrote: | Nice, thanks for sharing! | utopcell wrote: | Adding to this Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" [1]. | | [1] https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html | dmitshur wrote: | There's a short story along these lines I remember reading | somewhere, but I could never find it again. It describes the | experience of someone whose brain is separated from their body | but kept connected to it via a remote connection. Over time | there are various experiments or different situations, like | going into a cave to experience higher latency, maybe | controlling multiple bodies at once, replacing the biological | brain with an equivalent simulated one, and some others. I wish | I could remember more of the details... | | 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. | MaxBarraclough wrote: | I recommend _The Nine Billion Names of God_ by Arthur C. | Clarke. | | https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.htm... | agravier wrote: | Also Lena by qntm: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo | fiforpg wrote: | I like how the word "meat" is clearly an inaccurate translation | of a notion in the language of the conversation, for lack of a | better word in human languages. "Organic matter" would be more | accurate, but less striking. | | 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. | leeoniya wrote: | "if god didnt want us to eat pigs, he wouldn't have made them | out of bacon!" | delecti wrote: | Funnily I thought almost the opposite. I feel like "meat" is | deliberately chosen in-character to be both less precise and | less respectful than "organic matter". It would be like a | species with organic computers incredulously describing our | computers as "rocks". | shawnz wrote: | I think that the computers-as-rocks analogy works even better | than this story, since there is no such thing as non-sentient | meat, but there most certainly are rocks that can't compute | philistine wrote: | - Can you believe those so-called humans. They made their | computing devices out of rocks! They shovel sand out of | beaches, make disgusting plates out of it, and force | electricity through little paths of metal on them. | | - Ew! | themanmaran wrote: | The Long Sun series (also Gene Wolfe) was another excellent use | of this. Everything is narrated by a priest unknowingly living | on a generational starship and you're left to interpret the | world around them. | cubefox wrote: | I think this idea was much smarter (and funnier) executed in | Stanislaw Lem's short story "Prince Ferrix and the Princess | Crystal". | pohl wrote: | Heck, all of The Cyberiad has this dismissal of meat done | better. | hermitcrab wrote: | "But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way | through." | dwheeler wrote: | I like this audio performance: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GggK9SjJpuQ&pp=ygUZVGhleSdyZ... | | It makes me smile each time. | hoten wrote: | This American Life recorded this w/ Maeve Higgins and H. Jon | Benjamin. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5usXhX0zaO4&ab_channel=Podcl... | RobRivera wrote: | Sounds like Mcguirk | Mistletoe wrote: | He is McGuirk. Apologies if you whooshed me. | delta_p_delta_x wrote: | My favourite short story is _Last Contact_ , by Steven Baxter[1]. | It always scared the hell out of me, because it was so... | _mundane_ , to the very end. | | [1]: | https://web.archive.org/web/20080725045740/http://www.solari... | HanClinto wrote: | That was beautiful and haunting, thank you! | hotnfresh wrote: | A lot like _Melancholia_. | | 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. | KennyBlanken wrote: | Finis? | | http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0605041.txt | DalasNoin wrote: | I feel somewhat similar about the arrival of AGI, I definitely | want to cherish my time now more. I think it is at least | plausible that these are the last years of anything resembling | any value. Even beyond my own existence. It is not exactly the | same, with AGI there is more uncertainty about timelines and | outcome, and there is no general expert opinion that one could | defer to. | SuperHeavy256 wrote: | I love it, reminds me a lot of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. | jksmith wrote: | https://youtu.be/T6JFTmQCFHg?si=cfIs3_mZ9bI_WtX4 | golemotron wrote: | I like that performance even more than the story. Tom Noonan is | a great actor. The other actor is wonderful in this too. | badosu wrote: | I enjoyed thoroughly this short exploring concepts of time | perception between host and child simulated reality entities: | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien... | wbl wrote: | This has been turned into a truly hilarious song with only a few | changes. https://youtu.be/6NW67-Mu2wU | DonHopkins wrote: | If God didn't mean for people to eat other people, he wouldn't | have made us of meat! | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjAHw2DEBgw | epgui wrote: | Makes me think of the dual idea that "neural nets can't be | conscious/etc" | svat wrote: | Also: "Your Whole Family Is Made Of Meat" | https://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=484 which became the title of | a Dinosaur Comics book. | Borrible wrote: | And they lack communion. | | Such loneliness. | | Poor Things. | | https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ | helpfulmountain wrote: | Enjoyed this but upon reflection seems odd that they would have a | word "meat" and yet be unfamiliar with biological systems / | consciousness in animals. | miffel wrote: | That's what seems odd? It's no more odd than aliens speaking | English in the first place. | | 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. | timeon wrote: | "Meat" here reminds particular mammals that other mammals, | other animals, are sentient as well. For many it is just meat. | data_vault wrote: | Another great interpretation of the story would be via | speciesism/anthropocentrism, we consider ourselves better | than other animals, but for the aliens, we would all be | "meat". | oxygen_crisis wrote: | Odd, how? | | 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... | utopcell wrote: | "Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence | in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic | rotation ago, wants to be friendly again." | | 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. | shpx wrote: | I've never understood what people see in this story. Meat is a | complex organization of trillions of self-replicating machines, | each of which (besides red blood cells maybe) is also incredibly | complex... much more advanced than anything human minds have been | able to build. | | 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. | kragen wrote: | i think the point of the story is exactly what you've gotten | from it | | 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 | boringuser2 wrote: | But they aren't, and there is no obvious vector for them to | develop the capability. | kragen wrote: | while they don't yet rise to the level i would describe as | 'intelligent' without qualifications, they do seem to be | less unintelligent than most of the humans, and in | particular most of the ones criticizing them in this way, | who consistently repeat specific criticisms applicable to | years-ago systems which have no factual connection to | current reality | boringuser2 wrote: | It doesn't matter how it "appears". | | 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. | lucubratory wrote: | Can any device ever be intelligent, according to you? | andy99 wrote: | There's no point in arguing with these people. We know | how an llm works, we could reproduce it on a big piece of | paper. But people that can't separate them from magic see | "intelligence" in them because they sound humam like. | There's an article "confused by a mirror" I've seen | somewhere that summarizes it well. | | Anyway, if we encountered seemingly sentient life and | didn't know how it worked, I can see keeping an open mind | that it might indeed be sentient. If we trained a next | token predictor and it produced coherent sentences, it | would be ridiculous to assume it was intelligent/sentient | because we know how it works and know it isn't. | | Edit: https://www.theverge.com/23604075/ai-chatbots-bing- | chatgpt-i... I had the name wrong | _heimdall wrote: | How are you defining intelligence? And how are you | measuring the abilities in existing LLM systems to know | they don't meet these criteria? | | 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. | data_vault wrote: | This is literature, it can be interpreted as how deeply we | judge those who don't look like us. | swayvil wrote: | This is pretty good. | | It reminds me of Friendship is Optimal | | https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal | doubloon wrote: | weird to remember when universities gave people web pages and let | them remain, even after they left. | | the owner has apparently passed away. | | https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonglobe/name/david-... | | https://stuff.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/dave/resume.html | mfringel wrote: | Dave was a friend. He was one of the most intellectually | curious people I knew. Gone way too soon. | jevogel wrote: | I first heard this story on an episode of This American Life. It | was performed by H Jon Benjamin and Maeve Higgins. It's a great | performance. | | https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803/greetings-people-of-ear... | SilverBirch wrote: | I feel like you could write a variation with this attitude: | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_pDTiFkXgEE | dang wrote: | Related: | | _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) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-11-26 23:00 UTC)