Kayla Nguyen
WR-121-12
“They’re Made Out Of Meat,” by Terry Bisson, is a humorous but at first a slightly confusing story of which there is no narration. They’re just two characters involved and the dialogue consists solely of a conversation between these two. The story begins with the characters talking about a new discovery which is made completely from meat, even the brain. The characters cannot understand how this “meat” could have developed a conscience and so how it can be considered “alive”. At first it is confusing as to what the meat actually is or even who the characters are, but as the story progresses the reader begins to understand that the meat is actually humans and the characters are aliens from outer space, the key piece of evidence to show this is their use of unusual words like “wedelei” and “orfelei”. The story ends with the characters choosing to ignore the humans and simply leaving.
The main theme of the story is assumption and rationalization. It expresses the idea that nobody understands everything and that assuming that what applies to one is what applies to all is not always the case. The aliens for example do not think that living meat is logically possible, and when they find out they try to rationalize the humans using their own beliefs. Failing to do so, they dismiss the idea and pretend it simply never happened because they leave instead of trying to make contact. This is a reflection of how humans have always turned a blind eye to what they don’t understand and often grow to fear it or run away from it (like the aliens did) merely because they cannot explain it. The message here is that although there may be an explanation for everything, don’t assume that something is wrong just because you cannot find that explanation.
It also raises the dual issues of the seeming disconnect between our physical baseness and our mental capacities, and of human chauvinism. We are made to see the seeming absurdity in modern cognitive neuroscience, in that “meat”, the same stuff that constitutes a hamburger, is understood to give rise to the mental life that we value so much. It is interesting, however, that the other, normal, non-meat creatures that the narrators discuss are also physical beings, although of a different sort than the “meat” on earth. Therefore, intelligence is still ultimately based in physical processes, such as the dynamics of an electron plasma. Because of this, “meat” does not in fact suggest that the mind cannot be the result of physical processes, unless it makes that suggestion through the irony of having beings whose minds arise from physical processes alien to us finding the physical processes that our minds arise from bizarre.
This brings us the second issue, that of human chauvinism. We, humans, assume that if we find intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they will be, fundamentally, the same as us. The story’s challenge to human chauvinism only goes so far, however, as the minds of the narrators and the non-meat beings they encounter still seem to work the same way as our own, just with a different underlying physical structure. Indeed, their minds are similar enough to our own that contact is possible, and while it seems we might not find them if we were looking for extraterrestrial biology similar to our own, it still seems that we would recognize their activities as carrying the stamp of intelligence. As such, “meat” does not really confront us with the possibility of minds that are unrecognizable to us as such; we are not presented with odd situations such as Jupiter having a subjective life that arises out of the dynamics of its atmosphere, or a light bulb experiencing being on or off, or the interactions of the entire human race producing a mind of which we are as unaware and incapable of understanding as individual neurons are of our own minds. Of course, this would be an extraordinarily difficult story to write; and it would be similarly difficult, possibly even impossible, for us as humans to find such minds. And so, while being careful not to look only for physical life that is like our own, in regards to extraterrestrial intelligence we would have to rely on a sort of Turing Test: are the sorts of things it’s doing the sort of things we do? If so, then regardless of how exactly it works, we would seem to have discovered a mind elsewhere in the universe.
Kayla Nguyen 