To them, they're just disguised as "what the creatures on this planet look like," which is obviously (to them) not meat, because they've never seen meat beings. To them, we are obviously not-meat, although how we appear is compatible with being meat. But silicone dyed the correct shade can look like meat. Stone painted the right color can look like meat.

And if you say that silicone and stone don't look like meat even when prepared to copy it, bear in mind that we are made of meat and very good at distinguishing it. Different races favor different attributes for distinguishing one person from another, hence why "they all look alike" is somewhat true for pretty much any "them" you care to name. Rocky from Project Hail Mary almost certainly thinks all humans look alike.

Also, funny to see Ben Bailey outside of a taxi cab.

The two talking, and other races, are machines that cover themselves however they like. These two are machines with artificial skins. That is normal. Fully meat beings are not. At least that is how I always read this story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Noonan

That does not follow at all. It's _likely_ that life elsewhere would be carbon-based since carbon is so useful and common. It is not a requirement. Silicon has been proposed as a replacement. While not as flexible as carbon, it's pretty close. Silicon-based lifeforms wouldn't be "organic" at all. Even if we just stick to carbon, there are many organic compounds (and lifeforms) that aren't anything close to what we would consider 'meat'.

We are working with N=1. Until we find more lifeforms elsewhere, we can't assume anything beyond basic physics and chemistry. RNA isn't a given. A lifeforms probably needs something that will pass along instructions to their offspring (in whatever form they take). It doesn't have to be RNA.

For a fictional description of a lifeforms that doesn't have RNA, DNA or anything remotely similar, I like to point out Blindsight, by Peter Watts. https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Things are far more complex on a biological level, which makes it harder to make generalized predictions. I see no reason to infer that life would only consistently evolve into organic life as we know it.

What makes you a big fan of the story/reminded you of it here? I just gave it a re-read and thought it was alright. Not my favorite work of his... but certainly not bad either. Perhaps I've just read too many Sci-Fi stories to be properly shocked by the theme given the relatively short time to be immersed in the setting :).

I think the short film completely misses the mark if both entities are there in human form, in a diner. (Of course, budget constraints, and the adaptation cannot just be two inorganic beings talking, but still...)

If it was just talking about carbon based lifeforms it wouldn't land the same way.

Maybe this kind of thing isn't for you if the above is required explanation, though.

The author is trying to get you to speculate on the kind of intelligence that would say this about humans.

Yes, they do:

> "“Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”"

What they cannot fathom is a sentient lifeform that achieves things but lives their entire lives as meat-based things, flapping their meat mouth parts to make disgusting meat sounds at each other. And I think they really never thought much about human reproduction!

* This is a virtual environment and the "meat actors" are depicting avatars of virtual/not-meat entities inhabiting that world. That's why there's inconsistencies with real life, for example the red guy's clothes. This was what I thought when I first saw this short.

* This was really an exchange of concepts and data in a language not really suitable for humans to understand. So what you are seeing is not what actually took place, but a translation. Some machine took the abstract data interchange and translated it to what it thought would be more appropriate for a meat head to understand, including setting it up in an environment that would make sense to a human. But it made some mistakes (the clothes, the weird behavior of some characters). This could have predicted AI Video slop, in a way.

Perhaps it's predecessor was just advanced enough to build self-modifying replicators and fire them out into space. Eventually it hits a planet or asteroid and gradually becomes sentient and intelligent. No trace of how it originated.

I personally hate that it implies there are faster ways to travel than light speed. We know this to be a hard limit in the physics of our universe and it rubs me the wrong way when SF writers just glaze over reality. Not to mention hydrogen life forms, what’s that about!?

At times we get all giddy because we have invented a quartz clock, a wheel, a straight line or a calculator that seems to be better than anything in the world of nature, however, we sometimes have to overlook nature or forget to question why nature didn't evolve such things. With the clock, every cell in our body has some 'timing circuitry' tied into day/night cycles, seasons and much else. We just insist on doing it our way and proclaiming it better.

> “That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”

> “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they’re made out of meat.”

And indeed sentient species that are partly made of meat:

> “Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”

> “Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.”

This story is obviously satire. Meaning, it is a lie that tells the truth.

I get the constraints of short indie films, I love them regardless, but in this particular case it completely misses the mark.

https://www.contecurte.eu/2019/05/ecumene-silly-asses/

1st generation stars seed the galaxies with carbon.

2nd generation stars are a sea of amino-acid comet soup. One bag-of-mostly-water lifeform evolves sentience. Its legacy is silicon intelligence, broadcast through the galaxy. It disappears.

3rd generation stars illuminate meat-based life, but it holds no novelty for the silicon travelers between the stars.

On a separate note, science fiction isn't generally about science, imo, it's about human politics (Greg Egan being an outlier). The cod-science gives colour and setting. If you read it as stories about humanity, maybe the charlatanry won't irk you so much. I find this mindset helps me deal with my own irascibility.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/8vbfgk/the_veil_of_mad...

Their references are not to creatures that are meat through-and-through but fictional alien races that have a kind of incidental relationship to meat that doesn't establish meat-based cognition as normal the way that animals would.

"Oh god, you're right! They're all just tiny pieces of rubber and silicon, transistors and circuits all crammed chaotically together! How horrifying!"

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.

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.

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...

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."

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.

If you put two stones in the ground, they define a line. It goes through the center of mass of both stones and extends towards both sides through the universe.

Now remove the stones.

Does the line stop existing? You can still "see it" in your brain. It could be argued that the line has always been there. That the stones were just a marker. A means for an idea to manifest in the physical word. You could put any two other markers at any point on that line and they would represent the same line.

The idea that "the cube is made out of meat" is akin to saying that "the line is made out of stone". Ideas always exist, their representation in the physical world don't.

Your sense of consciousness is just one of those representations. It is "immortal", just like the line is. In principle it could exist without the physical substrate that is your brain, or in a different substrate. Probably there's a way to encode all of that into a big number.

I think this is where the idea of an "immortal soul" comes from. It is however kind of easy to misinterpret it, especially if one is a mesopotamian sheperd who explains the world with gods and religion.

On another level even this clarification kind of misses the mark because many/most versions of the HPOC still treat physical substrate as a necessary condition, just not a sufficient one, sometimes will appeal to radio receivers, or the mental and physical being two aspects of the same underlying thing (sometimes called neutral monism). I personally think that view is mistaken and deeply confused, but even so, it's a view that ties consciousness to the substrate of "thinking meat" without reducing it, and would probably be a moot point from the aliens perspective.

The hard problem of consciousness isn't.

It's a discussion of reality stemming from an inspirational fiction. The whoosh apply to you.

There was a time not long ago when reportedly looking at the emails being exchanged around the world one would think the most pressing matter, discussed at length, was how to "enlarge your penis".

Is it though? What is it satirizing? Is it satirizing the idea of water and carbon based life? How does that tell any truth?

    The big bear tended the fire, breaking up the dry branches by holding one end and stepping on them, like people do. He was good at keeping it going at the same level. Another bear poked the fire from time to time but the others left it alone. It looked like only a few of the bears knew how to use fire and were carrying the others along. But isn’t that how it is with everything? Every once in a while, a smaller bear walked into the circle of firelight with an armload of wood and dropped it onto the pile. Median wood has a silvery cast, like driftwood.

Edit: spelling

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.

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 didn't hate it, and I always appreciate the charm of low budget productions. I'm just saying this particular adaptation doesn't work for me, and trying to explain why.

One low budget feature-length film about aliens I quite liked (though it obviously has a higher budget, and of course its own set of flaws; and to be clear I'm not arguing both productions are in the same ballpark!) is "The Vast of Night" [1]. I quite liked the actors and the directorial choices.

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[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6803046/

In the story, there's little doubt these are aliens (though their physical form, if they have any, is never described). If there's any doubt, it's about what they are talking about -- but this is dispelled pretty soon too.

I think the real reason is simply budget.

I can understand the limitations of working around budget, and constraints sometimes spark some inventive storytelling, like in the pretty cool "The Booth at the End", which has a very similar minimalistic setting in a diner! In fact, this short somewhat reminded me of that much better show.

(If you haven't watched "The Booth at the End", I strongly encourage you to do so... it used to be free online ages ago, not sure now).

British spies in WWII wouldn't do that if the entire concept of what a swastika was baffled them. You have to understand at least basically what the thing you're looking at is in order to use it as a symbol.

If you have _no_ concept of people being made out of meat being possible, you don't dress up as people made out of meat. You do that if it's a common concept to you and you're trying to fit in.

Consciousness might have actually started today at 7am and, before that, we were all automatons without subjective experience of the world, just going through the motions.

You might say that's impossible, because yesterday you were conscious and you know that, but you can't prove it to anyone.

Epistemologically, this is not a problem that can be solved with "give it time".

More seriously, what you describe is partly the short story. The short film adaptation doesn't quite work for me, for the reasons I explained in other comments.

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.

The concept of meat isn’t foreign. Meat that’s sentient and has no cybernetic parts or phase is.

And they do say they’ve studied and probed for several human lifetimes.

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.

Only one of them has. The other is entirely surprised by the whole concept, and wouldn't even entertain disguising itself as something it has never considered and in fact it's being convinced during the story it even exists.

It's important for the story to work that one of the beings is entirely unconvinced and has to be told, as they discuss the matter, that this is an actual thing!

He’s dressed like someone told “hey you have to try to blend in” and didn’t really know how.

> He’s dressed like someone told “hey you have to try to blend in” and didn’t really know how.

Blend with what? It (the alien) didn't believe these "meat" sentient beings existed when the story starts! It had to be told during the conversation. It thought there must have been machines somewhere who were the real sentient beings. How can anyone attempt to blend in with something one doesn't believe exists?

I understand the adaptation changes this, because there's no other way of working with human actors and also staying within budget. I understand the decision; I'm just saying it misses the mark and makes the story way less funny.

The way I envision this story is a couple of aliens, much like the scenes with the Simpsons aliens, hovering in a spaceship near Earth, discussing humans, with only one of them having actually seen a human. It doesn't work if both have seen them.

All in my opinion, of course, taste and sense of humor are completely subjective.