In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 41-45

I have nothing to add today, but I have to justify the indent:

There’s one more feature that these things possess:
an extra fancy autopilot mode.
The tubes can run themselves quite well unless
presented with an overriding code.

Not only can they fully self-propel;
they'll also benefit from their mistakes.
They’ll learn from other such machines as well,
so they can live in unimagined lakes.

They will be needing heavy-duty brains
or silicon equivalents thereof,
more like our own than artificial strains
that work below on what was done above.

The tubes’ designers, in this AI plight,
have found a way, but only their best guess.
Some variations in their makeup might
work better with environmental stress.

The robots that live long will reproduce.
The others—well, it’s just like in the wild.
More goslings for the strong and healthy goose;
the smarter parent has the smarter child.

© 2010 Louis A. Merrimac

Work below: I asked Cassie Tabori, a friend who understands artificial intelligence (AI) what this means. She says human brains, like other animal brains, use what they call parallel processing, in which the strength of various influences affect the organism’s behavior. She says this is much more amenable to learning than is the linear processing that computers use. She went on about some robot dog called Aibo, but she lost me. I think I know as much as I need to know about AI in order to follow the plot of this story, and I’m not about to attempt to understand it any better.

In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 37-40

The Facebookers revised #39 for me. I had something about 'types who look like us', which is easily misinterpreted. Three annotations today.

They’ll take equipment, furnishings, and food;
they will have been accumulating these.
There’s lots of stuff they’ll need to have accrued,
like squirrels for their winter in the trees.

When everything’s unloaded they’ll detach
(I’m sure they’ll leave some time to say goodbye).
A second ship will bring a second batch.
They call this one the father. Who knows why?

This reproductive rite they will rehearse
to give the little colony its start,
while inside, mortals many ways diverse
now operate three cylinders apart.

There will be present, though, some dozens more
that won’t have been existing as they will—
those waiting for the colonists to score
by knowing which commandment to fulfill.

© 2010 Louis A. Merrimac

Who knows why: That would be people who have read Canto II.
Existing as they will: A strange way of saying they are waiting to be fashioned into something else.
Commandment: Genesis 1:28—not one of the Big Ten.

In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 33-36

I am drawing myself out of the blogging business for a while and returning to the simple task of relating the story. I would like at some point to provide a brief history of its writing as mentioned in yesterday's post, but I have concluded that it is better to wait until we have more thoroughly developed some of the ideas.

With that out of the way, here is today’s bit of verse:

And if the project goes as well as planned,
they’ll add more airplanes made from the same mold.
But only the materials come from land;
the new ones are assembled by the old.

They take a recently retired plane;
they do it like the ones already done;
they set it on the water with a crane
to wait between the ocean and the sun.

Next, one of the incumbent submarines
will surface right behind the empty craft,
and, after some preliminary scenes,
will plug its fore into the other’s aft.

A cockpit door will open to conceive,
and from the mother ship some will pass through.
One-third of its inhabitants will leave
to form one-half the daughter’s maiden crew.

© 2010 Louis A. Merrimac

Do it like: Presumably this means whatever they did to make a cylindrical shell out of the fuselage.

In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 28-32

Today I find the direction of my involvement with this business back on its previous course. Jeff has chided me for writing exclusively about my experience with that involvement. He feels I should divert some of the time I spend and server space I occupy with this blog to an account of the genesis of In the Next Life. I have trouble imagining more interest on the part of readers in my anecdotes about a previous decade than in those about comtemporary events. I expect to exhaust my material before long if I continue on my present course, however, and I could do worse, as I am sure I would were I to share my opinions about politics or other events about which my knowledge is even more limited. I intend to give the aforementioned suggestion due consideration.

Meanwhile, I have an update about yesterday's inconvenience. After I successfully duplicated the problem this morning by attempting again to paste into the dialog box, I fired a shot in the proverbial dark by clicking the 'Settings' tab. There I discovered options entitled 'Updated editor', 'Old editor', and 'Hide compose mode', with the second radio button marked. I gamely selected the first one. Not only did that enable pasting; it provided me with a term to use as an alternate to 'dialog box'. Now when I type 'Control-V' I am prompted to allow this webpage to access my clipboard. That leads me to believe it was less an issue with compatibilty than with misguided concern for my security. The updated version has some undesirable effects, including the interpretation of the spacebar press as a 'non-breaking space' (I had to ask the web to disabbreviate '&nbsp'), the cluttery repetition of font information (visible only in 'Edit Html' mode), and the doubling of ersatz carriage returns, which has the effect of inserting blank lines. The extra blank lines are easy enough to remove, and it was actually somewhat gratifying to watch the text reassemble as I alternately typed the Delete key and the down arrow. The other enhancements were more time-consuming to overcome, though, so I switched back to the 'Old editor' for the remainder of the session.

With that out of the way, here is today's bit of verse, with annotation:

I’ll fill you in a little on the way
some astronauts will spend the coming year.
Were I a scientist I’d have to say
you’d need some details that you won’t get here.

The idea is to start the thing out small:
two metal cylinders set end to end.
Some airplane fuselages gave up all
except their noses so they could attend.

They’re separated by an airtight lock
in case of (God forbid) an accident.
A passageway connects them to a dock
through which replacements and supplies are sent.

The tubes can be unhooked so they run free,
with six pneumatic legs ranged side by side,
a pair of which can grab things from the sea,
the other four remaining in their stride.

On some occasions, mostly after dark,
they’ll crawl ashore, partaking of the skies.
They’ll wander through a military park,
replenishing their ballast and supplies.

© 2010 Louis A. Merrimac

Were I a scientist: I think what he really means is “Were I a science fiction writer.…” It’s not just that he’s trying to scoot out of doing the research to provide the detail. He’s also trying to avoid being lumped in with a type that he regards as generally pedantic and self-congratulatory.

In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 24-27

For the first time in several days, I am drawn no further into this business, except that I shall be required to spend more time at the keyboard than usual. Other than the initial formatting difficulties, the process of writing this blog had been fairly painless until today. Perhaps staff are needed at Google to maintain the paste buffer functionality, and nobody fills those positions on weekends. More likely something in my home computer is incompatible with the dialog box in which I now find myself typing every letter and punctuation mark of this post. Needless to say, I have little to report. On second thought, it is not needless to say that. I would have typed every letter of this paragraph and the next even had I been able to copy and paste the part that I composed years ago, the dusting off of which is the primary purpose of this undertaking. I shall have to learn how to add a copyright symbol at the end, however.

With that out of the way, here is today's bit of verse. Fortunately, no annotations were deemed necessary for these stanzas:

In order to accomplish this, they'll need
Some healthy men and women they can train.
These individuals will be the seed
from which society will grow again.

The problem here: They can't just advertise
for volunteers to live while others die.
For this to work, it must be a surprise.
It doesn't take a genius to see why.

A similar endeavor's what they need,
compatible with what they want to do.
Become involved, discredit those who lead,
then take control and work some changes through.

It just so happens something of the sort
is being planned but isn't yet in place:
an underwater test of life support
in preparation for a home in space.

© 2010 Louis A. Merrimac

The internet partially redeems itself once again: I found the secret code for the symbol. I would have typed rather than copied this part as well, but it would have been irrelevant had the internet not frustrated me in the first place.

In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 20-23

I find myself drawn further into this thing every day. I intended to use this forum just to present a few stanzas from In the Next Life now and then. Somehow I have gotten myself started not only posting every day, but also including two or three introductory paragraphs. Two days in a row does not establish much of a pattern, but if I make it three consecutive days I am afraid I might raise expectations among readers. I would ask the readers of this blog for their current expectations, but I have no idea of their number. Also, I have probably put people off by my treatment of one of the two readers who have clicked the Post Comment button and retyped nonsense words until a legible one was presented. Rest assured, my dear friends, that I am not poised to pounce on the next person who offers a comment. I wanted to express my frustration with the process of copying my work into hypertext markup language, my ignorance of the internet, and having been born too early for the computer age; and I knew Jeff would not mind a little gentle ribbing as long as I let him have the last word. I promise I shall not target other members of our little community in a like manner.

With that one paragraph (not enough to set a precedent, I hope) out of the way, here is today's bit. The Facebook crowd revised the first and fourth of these stanzas:

Suppose a group of intellectuals
are critically massed one afternoon.
They fear, as many do, the trend that pulls
toward nuclear disaster fairly soon.

They meet at a symposium, let’s say,
and hear respected scientists recite
the terrible predictions of the day
that fallout turns into an endless night.

They fear not on humanity’s behalf.
Some few will live to start the race anew.
And those who don’t have had their chance to laugh.
No creature lives forever in this zoo.

Don’t give them credit less than they deserve
for we to them have not the greatest worth.
Their mission is no less than to conserve
what’s left of civilization on this earth.

© 2010 Louis A. Merrimac

Give them credit: They haven’t done anything wrong yet, have they? The problem is that the line ending in ‘conserve’ has to precede the seed, so to speak.

In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 15-19

I find myself drawn even further into this thing. My sources inform me that my friend Jeff has taken offense at the way I described his annotations yesterday. I really do not feel compelled to apologize, as the most pejorative word I used was 'silly'. Some words of courtesy are in order, however, as I am grateful to Mr. Grund and his coworker, Bob Kern, for their assistance with this project. I had a great deal of difficulty copying the text from a Word document into the present format, and they managed to convert it into something passably close to the original. I did discover the secret of indentation on my own, and I take a modicum of pride in that.

Jeff probably thinks he is mocking me by repeating words from my post in his comment (yes, I read it, but that says nothing about the inclination of the general readership to do the same; nor does it show that anyone derives a benefit from any such viewings). I decline to take it that way. If my example helps him expand his vocabulary, we have accomplished something positive, have we not? Next we can work on stimulating his imagination.

With that out of the way, here is today's bit. The next stanza we see was contributed by Mr. Grund and his Facebook friends, and I incorporated their suggestions for changes to the subsequent stanza (I cannot believe I did not think of 'paradigm'). Also, this time we have annotations, which I am pasting below in Mr. Grund's words. I removed the superscript numerals that in the printed (MS Word) version link the notes to the body text because they produced extra spaces between the lines.

What are these minds thus modeled by these molds?
They’re parts of organisms that have grown
from blueprints. Who wrote them? Who drew the folds
through which words pass as we play Telephone?

Some scientists are now defining genes
as patterns that maintain themselves through time
by changing raw materials to machines
that pass them on—a useful paradigm.

But genes are not the leaders at that game;
that title goes to certain kinds of thought
that use the human mind to stay the same.
Our genes create the “is” that makes the “ought”.

I’ll leave it up to greater minds than mine
to tell us why our genes cooperate.
We’d have to see the whole ancestral line.
That’s more than I can handle at this date.

So, what I’d like to do today instead
is follow one of these things for a while
and see the possibilities ahead.
We’ll skip the past and turn another dial.

© 2010 Louis A. Merrimac

Kinds of thought: This is the concept of a ‘meme’ as proposed by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene

Makes the "ought": The author is not arguing that moral principles can be objectively derived. He is simply saying that morality, although entirely subjective, generally serves to promote reproductive behavior, and is therefore adaptive. Other writers have grasped this concept, but as far as I know, none have carried it as far as this one.

In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 11-14

I am getting drawn further into this business, it seems. First I gave Jeff Grund permission to post the Next Life on Facebook one stanza at a time to troll for interest. I thought it could do no harm, as the story was generating no revenue parked in a .doc file. Then he started sending me changes. I have no objection to that; I am not required to accept them. Then he said it is hard for people to follow his posts, and it would be easier to read if I put it in a blog. Well, I suppose I can play along with that, as long as I do not get dragged into one of those social networking sites. Now he says I should include his silly annotations in the blog because he is afraid people will not read them as Comments. He has not explained to me why I should be concerned about that. If readers feel they need them, they ought to be able to find them. In any case, the part I am posting today has none of those notes (he must have found all of it sufficiently transparent), so I have another day or two to think about it. Meanwhile, I am obliged to include this little preface so you will know where to find the earlier annotations. Readers who do not wish to be bored may disregard this paragraph.

Now that we have that out of the way, here is today's bit. If you have trouble understanding it, please read the preceding paragraph for information about whither to direct your complaints.

Could modified selection be the key?
Some values might have made their holders act
in ways that gave the holders’ progeny
a start in life that other children lacked.

Let’s take a value, then, down to its core.
What mechanism causes one to feel
that some things rate, and others even more?
Could it be tangible? Could it be real?

Well, if it is, we’d find it in our heads—
arrangements of the nerve cells, things like that—
a pattern that repeats, with varied threads,
depending on the neural habitat.

These patterns are translated into speech
or other symbols—we have many kinds,
which we can use to influence and teach.
We spread the patterns to each other’s minds.

© 2010 Louis A. Merrimac

In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 5-10

If like a chimp, I’d be so much more free.
With women I would share no more than fun.
I would not take responsibility
for what might happen after I am done.

Chimpanzees, one might say, don’t have our brains.
They haven’t near as much to learn, at least.
A mother ape, by instinct, merely trains
her young to gather food, just like a beast.

Our aptitudes increase as knowledge grows.
We gain a big advantage when we’re taught.
We think, invent, establish, and propose.
That extra parent’s handy, is he not?

Okay, that’s fine so far: We’ll say a dad’s
behavior is adaptive; that’s resolved.
But not too long ago, all men were cads.
How rapidly have families evolved?

Besides, if fatherhood were ours innate,
then men not brought up right would still behave
a lot more like the rest, whose chosen fate
is kin to volunteering as a slave.

That’s not to say, I should point out, that men
are under women’s orders. That’s too far.
It only seems a greater contrast when
considering what our genetics are.

© 2010 Louis A. Merrimac

In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 1-4

IN THE NEXT LIFE
CANTO I: THE CREATION
In which several concerned persons undertake to save the world by exploiting its impending destruction, and a sort of robot is employed to this purpose, being designed to carry people in hostile environments for extended periods.

Do you ever get the feeling that ‘free will’ is a joke?
—The Book of the Subgenius, Chapter 0

I watched a pair of cardinals today.
The hen and cock were never far apart.
They always stay together, experts say.
I must confess a warming of my heart.

Now, any male chimpanzee, so I’ve heard,
obtains what sex he can without regard
for whom he had before, unlike the bird
who, with his mate, brings cheer to my back yard.

So why is it that I do not possess
the nature of our closer relative?
I envy him his sexual success,
and yet I’m like the finch in how I live.

Not only do I act that way; I’m proud
to be devoted to my only bride.
Monogamy is what we say aloud,
while lack thereof is something we must hide.

© 2010 Louis A. Merrimac