Terry Bisson is a science fiction author whose site hosts his short stories, including the well-known 'They're Made Out of Meat'.
HN links it mainly to credit Bisson as author of 'They're Made Out of Meat', which commenters call a classic, and to give the original text.
> If you can explain the mechanism behind the manifestation then you can understand why it isn't real.
I watched, with my family, the Algorithms documentary available on Netfix. While not perfect (but very, very good), it certainly did a great job of explaining in simple terms some algorithms and how they relate to the world.
One of the most interesting parts, in my opinion, was the admittance during the section where they were discussing the XBox Kinect. It was all done through some machine learning algorithms, and impressively, they confessed to not being completely certain how the code actually worked. You could argue that this means that they cant explain the mechanism behind the manifestation.
Now, of course, this is a massively simplified version against the near-future Westworld narrative. However, it does call into question whether we would understand the mechanism of something so advanced. Also, applied to humans, if we end up understanding the mechanisms behind the brain, then does that make us less real?
They point out in episode three I think that one of the 'Hosts' are experiencing physical discomfort while going through diagnosis. If such a thing were coded, and it was made possible to respond to it (I would argue that the best possibility for making this possible would be a learning algo, similar to the Kinect analogy), then how would that be different from the very physical and chemical responses that a human has to experiencing suffering?
It's…
Your argument is kind of contradictory. It assumes that we are not worthy of visiting but an argument like that suggests that they’ve already found us and interstellar travel is feasible. They’ve also solved all the logistic problems you’re referring to. Whether they like to make contact or not is somewhat irrelevant to this context.
For the sake of argument let’s linger on that assumption for a while. How for example did they found us when our civilization achieved radio signals transmission in the last couple of centuries? That means that they’re close by, unless FTL travel is feasible in which case we can safely assume the whole galaxy should be teeming with life. But if they’re close by shouldn’t we be able to spot them? And if they’re far away that means they should already have colonized half the galaxy before they decide to launch an expedition to a planet thousands of light years away.
The worrying factor relating to the “Fermi Paradox” is that it suggests that maybe life is extremely rare. We could very well be the only living souls in this part of the Universe and that’s kind of heart breaking considering the sheer size of the whole thing.
By the way, your assumption is called the "Zoo Hypothesis" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis
Oh, and while we're in this scenario I'd urge everyone to read the following SF short.
http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html
>Now obviously animals cannot think of or cannot communicate with us that they do not want to be eaten the same way we could with another species
That's not obvious. The will to live is strong everywhere, and that cows don't speak "human" isn't to say they don't have a will to live (not be eaten). Nor that we can't speak "alien" any sign that we don't have a will to live (not be eaten).
This all reminds me of: http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html
I'll post an article that is not a serious technical discussion, but I hope you enjoy it anyway because it has a very different perspective. It's a nice story and it is reposted every other year in HN. http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html (HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152131 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3549320 )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Bisson
http://www.terrybisson.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bears_Discover_Fire
https://web.archive.org/web/20080408140718/http://www.terrybisson.com/meat.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20190408195452/http://www.terrybisson.com/page4/page4.html
The 'made out of meat' is definitely a reference to a short story ( http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html ) which was also made into a short film ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaFZTAOb7IE ). Great stuff.
(Of course, SPAM® is also a meat product. Supposedly.)