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 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 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