Analysis "They're Made of Meat"

Hampshire College
Philosophy of Mind

Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made of Meat” raises the dual issues of the seeming disconnect between our physical baseness and our mental capacities, and of human chauvinism. In regards to the first question, 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. (There are even those, such as John Searle in his essay “Minds, Brains, and Programs”, who seem to suggest [however vaguely] that mental processes can only arise from the sort of physical processes that happen in the human brain.) 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 (which brings up a whole new set of issues and questions about the relationship between the mind and the physical to be discussed at some other time). 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 (the situation is the same for the narrators of the story in regards to us: they could recognize the radio signals we produce as coming from intelligent beings). 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.