[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

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).

[latexr]

> 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]

People: "How dare this short story underestimate what aliens could imagine"

Also people: "AI will never be as intelligent and capable has humans are"

[vidarh]

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.

[timeon]

> This feels very shallow and wrong.

What would you expect from meat.

[gizajob]

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]

How dare it mock us so.

[3cats-in-a-coat]

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]

> 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/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGh...

[pixl97]

>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]

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.

[wruza]

  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.

[teddyh]

> we also exhibit odd and illogical cultural trends

Culture is illogical. If it was logical, it wouldn’t be culture.

[lo_zamoyski]

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.

[teddyh]

Culture might lead to logic, but the pursuit of logic is not, itself, logical.

[otabdeveloper4]

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]

"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?

[otabdeveloper4]

No, because animals don't have human rights.

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.)

[3cats-in-a-coat]

You need to let this one simmer down and see how it is self-contradictory.

[CPLX]

“This science fiction would never happen in real life!!” is my favorite kind of comment.

[zdragnar]

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]

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]

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

[gosub100]

> 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.

[dist-epoch]

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]

> 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]

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 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.

[otabdeveloper4]

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]

Most of the meat consumed is not used to build things but is consumed by the body for energy.

[otabdeveloper4]

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]

What's matter?

[krallja]

Nothing, what’s matter with you?

[aatd86]

Hopefully nothing.

[Finnucane]

Meat doesn’t understand satire.