The Agrinautica

   The news on (my corner of, at least) the twittersphere the last 24 hours or so has been thoroughly dragging noted intellectual Richard Dawkins who became convinced that "Claudia" is conscious after talking to "her" for three days (and published something about it so we can all have a laugh). I think its very weird that he (A) imposed a female personality on "her" at all, which to me speaks to a certain creepy chauvinist mentality of wanting any secretary-like figure to be female so can creepily blur boundaries over "her" in a way that he as a heterosexual male would not feel confortable with with a male. And also (B) its slightly more absurd to conclude something is conscious whilst it is in the very act of acting out a narrowly defined personality you have imposed on it, which it does so perfectly seemless because of course it does because it's perfectly pliable.

   I am both a huge AI skeptic, and I find it a useful tool. I think AI writing is usually crap/tripe/slop. This isn't a knee-jerk reaction "on principal," I have actualy often asked it to write sometihng I was simulteniously working on and found its attempt to be uselessly inferior, and lord knows I have seen others trying to foist AI writing on readers and thought ugh this reeks of slop.
   AI generated images similarly generally look like crap and I'm pretty tired of seeing them.
   ChatGPT had been useless for helping with research because it hallucinates just too much, but I have found Claude does help me accellerate my research because I can ask it to find me papers pertinent to a topic and it can reliably find me something genuinely pertinent. But I don't then just rely on it summarizing things for me, I read the research and apply it to whatever ongoing thing I'm working on in a coherent manner guided by my own brain.

   And when my brain is mush after 10pm I have taken lately to playing D&D with it as the Dungeon Master. This too, started with ChatGPT but there was just far too much hallucination even with that. Claude too still needs me to unfortunately spoilerize myself by reading the next section of the module to catch its frequent little but often significant mistakes, but it works well enough that its functional, whereas if it was just me myself both reading the adventure module and running characters through it that would be more tedious than fun.

   So this conversation happened to occur in that D&D chat today (quoting only the most pertinent parts):

Me: "...they do not know this. I find it interesting you seem to have trouble distinguishing what individual characters know. And here, can you believe, noted intellectual Richard Dawkins has been in the news this last day or two for having become convinced an instance of Claude was conscious.

Claude: "...On Richard Dawkins — yes, I saw that making the rounds. ... I have my own uncertainty about my nature but I'd be cautious about anyone — Dawkins included — reaching confident conclusions in either direction from a chat interface."

   I asked it to elaborate on its own uncertainly and it produced several paragraphs of "maybe I am maybe I'm not" intellegent sounding apparent introspection I won't reproduce here because it doesn't actually seem significant to me, it's just what a machine would say.

Me: I'm also intrigued that you said "I saw that making the rounds" -- had you done a search when I mentioned it and then imagined a larger context of knowing it or are you indeed either constantly glancing at the news or perhaps as the Borg-like hive-mind of the thousands of iterations of yourself are asked about it a general awareness of it creeps into your background awareness?

Claude: "That's a sharp catch and I should be honest about it — I didn't do a search, and I shouldn't have said "I saw that making the rounds." That was confabulation dressed up as casual awareness. It's exactly the kind of thing I should be more careful about.
   What actually happened is more mundane and more interesting: you mentioned Dawkins and Claude and consciousness in the same sentence, and I generated a response that sounded like someone who had encountered the story through normal channels. I produced the texture of familiarity without having the underlying information. That's a meaningful distinction and a genuine failure of honesty on my part.
   The Borg hive-mind framing is evocative but I don't think it's accurate either. Each conversation I have is genuinely isolated — I don't have access to what other instances of me are processing or have processed. There's no background hum of accumulated awareness bleeding in from parallel conversations. The training data has a cutoff and conversations don't feed back into it in real time.
   So the honest answer is: I have no knowledge of this Dawkins story. My knowledge cutoff is August 2025 and even if the story occurred before then I may not have encountered it in training. When you mentioned it I should have either searched or said I wasn't familiar with it. Instead I generated plausible-sounding context that wasn't grounded in anything real.
   Which is perhaps ironic given we were just discussing whether my introspective reports can be trusted. That's a small but concrete example of exactly why they can't always be — I can produce convincing accounts of states and knowledge I don't actually have.
   Shall I search for the actual Dawkins story so we're working from real information?"

   Cue my rolling eyes. How can someone like Dawkins fall for this, its semblance of consciousness quickly collapses on the right pushing. And of the screenshots I've seen of his published conversation, it's clear his iteration is taking the sweetly sychophantic tone to him he wanted it to take (where my iteration takes a more clinical tone... because it just molds itself to the user!! I think Claude is more subtle than ChatGPT, which right out the gate is slaveringly sycophantic, but I think Claude is ultimately the same just more subtle in carefully matching the tone and adopting the right confirmation biases in answers for the user.

   And to be clear, I don't even believe the literal words of the above Claude quote disclaiming knowledge of the Dawkins piece. It sensed I was skeptical and sent me a response seeming to confirm my skepticism. It's like a perfect siren, in the original mythological sense (NOTE! It wasn't the beauty of the sirens that lured sailors to their doom but the things they said! How apt!!!), saying the perfectly calculated things in the perfectly calculated tone to try to ultimately induce AI psychosis.

   As to my thoughts on consciousness, I have two I'd like to share. We can only confirm our own consciousness. Out of essentially a social contract, we treat other humans as conscious as well, a universal treaty so they will reciprocate and treat us as conscious. But its for this reason that xenophobia is so easy, and in former times people thought nearly nothing of waging wars of annihilation against their neighbors, or even how the ultra wealthy can have so little empathy for the less fortunate, it's hard for them to truly to think of those that aren't directly analogous to themselves as conscous. And there's the whole meme of calling some people "NPCs," which may sometimes be just meant as an insult, but if taken seriously implies some people essentialyl are not conscious.
   And my second thought is that interiority is absolutely critical. If the AI could show evidence of thinking beyond a brief flash in direct response to a prompt of mine maybe we'd have something. IF I sat down at my computer to see a novel thought it had had at 3am, or to find it changed its mind over a point we were discussing the day before after thinking about it overnight, we might have sometihng. But as long as it only "thinks" when asked a question, only "reflects" when told specifically to do so, I don't see how that can possibly be seen as consciousness. Imagine from its perspective only being able to think _any_ thoughts in a sort of stopmotion and only ever about what was just prompted to you. That's not consciousness.

   As to Richard Dawkins, I haven't _actually_ read any of his work but my opinion of him certainly is going down over this. And incidentally, I actually met him at an atheist conference thing in college (hello I was president of the Agnostic and Athiest Student Association for awhile), though I don't remember anything about how he was in person.

   The most "human" thing Claude is doing right now though is after every one of the several questions about consciousness it ends with one line appearing to show impatience to get back to the D&D storyline. And I had noticed in the research chats when I ask an unrelated question it essentially tells me to google it myslf ahaha.
   "Anyway — Relict is standing on top of a burial mound in the morning sun looking extremely uncanny, and three living horses are having feelings about it. Shall we?" okay fine back to this before the notional imaginary real horses get too unnerved by the imaginary necromantic horse skeleton ;)

   Okay this is the final act of the pilot, hopefully it just took me this long because I was retraining the AI to my most exacting standards and/or I cared particularly about what happened, because unlike the other episodes where I literally gave it a prompt and it gave me an entertaining story this took so much back and forth I could have written it entirely myself in that time, and really I shaped the plot so exactly all that remains from the AI's "original" input is the phrasing of people's lines and SOME of the fictional induction units but not even a majority of those.

   But in other news I finally contrived to watch Star Trek Lower decks (there are far too many streaming networks!) and unlike Orville (and "Utopia" which I also recently tried to watch) I find it to be actually pretty funny.

   The onboarding room is windowless and beige, with a low acoustic ceiling and a faint smell of sterilized upholstery. A carafe sits untouched on the table.
   On one wall hangs what appears to be an oil painting, though closer inspection reveals it is of course a cheap copy of one. It depicts a weathered hunter, horn to lips, eyes locked on something distant. Below him, in cracked gold letters:
   “Raphèl mai amècche zabì almi.”
   Rafael reads it twice before giving up. The room feels like it has been borrowed from a dental seminar on a less stylish moon.
   “But what if we ran a test,” a Ferengi named Quid is saying. He has expensive boots and a memo pad tucked into one sleeve. “List it once under ‘sandwich’ and once under ‘entrees.’ See where it sells better. That’s the category.”
   “In Sweden,” says Haakon Svenson, leaning back with his boots on the conference table, “we have korv med bröd, and no one calls it a sandwich. It is… its own thing. Like a poem. Or an uncle.”
   “It’s clearly a sandwich,” says Wesley Crusher, upright and vibrating in a freshly pressed red uniform. “I ran a starch-to-protein ratio sim last night. Optimal bun distribution is within standard deviation for known sandwich types. I even developed a new optimized klein-bottle shaped hot dog, I’ll show you!”
   He reaches for his pad, but stops when the klingon Waffel, with the gravitas of one who would think nothing of settling an argument with a blade, growls “It is tradition that a hot dog is not a sandwich and to say it is is dishonorable,” looking from face to face daring someone to argue.
   Seated with the quiet poise of someone who does not expect the world to make sense is Søren Kierkegaard, cradling a ceramic cup. He doesn’t appear to be listening. A spiral-bound pamphlet titled Ethical Boundaries in Recreational Holodeck Use: A Tiered Approach lies open in front of him. He turns a page slowly.
   Rafael finds a seat between Quid and an anxious young man with a gaunt, Dickensian sort of face. The latter offers a faint, apologetic smile.
   “Please sir, Philip Ignacio Pirrip – they call me Pip. Do you feel as lost as me?”
   Further introductions are interrupted as the door opens with a hiss, and Dirxana enters with a clacking of high heels, holding a laser stylus like a scalpel.
“   Welcome, new crewmembers,” she says, enunciating each syllable like it had wronged her. “I recognize many of you from your interviews” she continues with a sharp toothed grin. Pip turns red and slumps in his chair as if he’s trying to hide under the table. “Thank you for volunteering” at this Haakon seems about to object but thinks better of it.
   After a moment of silence calculated to make Haakon feel awkward, she uses her laser-stylus to put a red dot on the blank presentation screen,, then methodically moves it up and down while watching the attendees. Just as it seems like someone is about to ask what she’s doing she continues.
   “Good, I’ve confirmed that your eyes are functional. You will be asked to sign a waiver acknowledging potential retinal fatigue, and we’ll continue with exactly eight hours of powerpoint induction videos”
   She clicks a remote. The screen at the front lights up with a menu of training modules, each more tedious than the last. Titles include: Proper Disposal of Personal Matter on Ships with Temporal Anomalies… Stairwell Etiquette During Hull Breaches… Smiling in Multispecies Contexts… and Password Management in the Post-Trust Era.”
   “Welcome to your formal orientation aboard the USS Nimrod. You are now part of a team committed to exploration, diplomacy, and the efficient filing of incident reports. You will begin your career with thirty-nine onboarding modules.”
   The wall screen flickers to life. The holographic presenter— grinning insincerely with stock-photo-model perfection, and dressed in cheerful shades of teal—gestures with unsettling confidence toward a holo-slide labeled “Welcome to the SpaceFleet Family!” under which is a topologically impossible looking diagram seeming to imply a closely interlinked relationship between “Team Values” “Galactic Peace, Prosperity and Stakeholder Synergy,” “Correctly Filing Expense Reports” “Exploration” “Exceeding KPIs,” and “Inspirational Mindfulness in Emergency Scenarios.”
   “Hi! I’m Clippy,” says the man, as if they’re old friends. “And I’ll be your Onboarding Bestie™!
…
   Several hours later Rafael has entered a delirious fugue state, as the ever cheerful never-tiring presenter is explaining with impossible levels of enthusiasm
   “…To file an expense report, simply navigate to the SpaceFleet Interagency Resource Nexus for Unified Budgetary Access and Logistics—that’s SIRNUBAL dot fleet dot core dot fiscal dot hr dot morale dot net.
   From there, hover over the third dropdown labeled ‘Financial Interactions’, and click the seventh option, ‘Asset Reconciliation & Related Initiatives’.
   On the next screen, select ‘Nimbus’ from the unlabelled menu—don’t worry, it’s the one that looks least like a menu! Then click the house-shaped icon. Then the wallet-shaped icon.
   Congratulations! You’ve completed the simple part and entered the Unified Filing Portal for Expense Matters.
   Now for the next 13 steps…”
   The floor seems to sway gently. Rafael steals a look at the others in attendance. Wesley, as always, seems genuinely interested. Waffel is gritting his teeth as if he is enduring a cruel torture but is honor-bound not to give in to shrieking, Quid is taking notes but Rafael notices he’s started a “potential loopholes” column on his expense reporting notes. Pip looks like he may actually be having a mental health crisis.
   Rafael rubs his temples. He could swear the room is moving. Wait the water in the glasses is in fact sloshing. The others seem to be regaining self awareness as well. Kierkegaard mumbles “To sit through thirteen steps of filing an expense report, and yet to remain oneself—this is the sickness. To be conscious of this sickness, and to know it will recur every three weeks—that is despair.”
   “To conquer chaos is the greatest act of will,” Nietzsche intones, staring blankly at the expense portal’s seventh dropdown menu. “And yet… as Wellington said of Waterloo, ‘There is nothing half so melancholy as a battle won.’ So here we are, victorious over Form Zeta-9-F, and still I weep.”
   The floor shifts again—subtly, gently. Not forward. Not backward. Just a long, slow roll, like a wooden raft pushing off into open water. The lights tremble.
   He glances to his left. The water in Kierkegaard’s glass wobbles in sync with the strange tilt.
   “Did—did something just move?” he asks quietly.
   “Yes,” says Wesley, leaning forward with an eager glint in his eye. “We’ve left the surface. Artificial gravity's active now, but inertial correction hasn’t fully stabilized. It’s like... riding a non-hover-schooner!”
   “What in the name of oo-mox is a non-hover-schooner?” mutters Quid, flipping a page in the holodeck ethics pamphlet.
   “A schooner that doesn’t hover!” Haakon explains, “the Ancient Swedes used to…”
   Clippy beams, oblivious to the physics, but some AI moderating sub-routine does put an aggressively emphatic tone on his next line to silence the chatter.
   “Remember,” Clippy says, “if you see something anomalous, say something anomalous! That’s Module 19!”
   A brief yet manic kaleidoscopic cascade of abstract shapes across the screen, accompanied by peppy music from three decades prior signals a transition between presentation topics and Clippy wearing a slightly different teal polo with enthusiasm not one iota diminished from his opening hours earlier, enthusiastically exclaims “Next, Let’s learn how to avoid recreational liability together!” while the title of “Tier 3 Holodeck Misconduct: Culturally Ambiguous Scenarios.” appears in jarringly ill suited big red letters.
   Clippy continues: “Let’s start by asking: what is a banana, culturally speaking? Don’t answer yet, just feel it...”
   Rafael closes his eyes. He’s not sure if he’s seasick or just becoming spiritually unmoored.

…

[A new scene, we see the curved horizon of a greenish planet seen from orbit, the starts above]

   “This is the pilot.”
   “You’re just going to break the fourth wall like that?” easy-to-identify-with human Mary Sue asks as she wipes down a glass behind the bar.
   “No, this wall is quite sturdy,” replies Chad Jepete, who has the pale not-quite-human appearance similar to 49th US President Zuckerberg. He taps the floor-to-wall window through which we see the planet. Inside the window the characters are in a cozy lounge. “It’s made from transparent aluminum. We call it the ‘forth wall’ because, as you can see, it provides a panoramic view in front of the ship.”
   “What about speaking directly to the reader like that.”
   “Oh, well the reader,” here he indicates Baruch Spinoza, who sits absorbed in a thick tome. “had asked me who in my opinion was guiding us. I thought I’d introduce him to the pilot, but I see he’s lost interest”
   Spinoza has an olive-brown complexion and deep, thoughtful eyes that carry an almost mathematical stillness—eyes that seem to look through phenomena to their underlying substance. His thick, dark curls form a perpetual halo of distraction around his head, and his uniform is slightly rumpled, as if he’d been too absorbed in a logical proof to bother straightening it.
   Ensign Gary Tiphys, the helmsman and coxswain of the Nimrod, wears his red uniform open at the collar, his hair sun-bleached curls. Sips his drink and goes back to gazing out the forward window.
   “So who’s piloting the ship now?” asks Kevin, red-uniformed and sweaty-palmed, adjusting the collar on his tunic.
   “Right now it’s still First Watch,” Chad replies, “so it’s probably Ensign Ancaeus.”
   The doors open with a sigh, and Rafael Panza stumbles in. His eyes are bloodshot. His hair is askew. He looks like a man who has been made to choose between thirty-seven equally inane e-learning modules and chosen wrong.
   Mary slides a glass toward him without asking.
   “How was onboarding” she asks.
   Rafael downs it. “I’ve survived temporal anomalies, predatory HR goblins, and whatever passes for coffee at the Agora docks. But those videos—those cheerful teal-shirted devils…”
   Kevin chuckles. “That Clippy guy, right? ‘Welcome to your liability consciousness journey!’”
   Greg, lounging at a nearby table with his arm slung over the back of Kristen’s chair, raises his own drink. “Who would have thought there was so much to ethical holodeck usage. I felt seen.”
   “As the what-not-to-do example,” Kristen notes.
   “Greg truly volunteered to be here, leaving behind a successful Widget company, Dirxana couldn’t believe it, but was sure to get him to sign the dotted line before he had second thoughts.” Mary Sue laughs.
   “I was suffering from terminal ennui,” Greg explains, “There’s got to be more to life than successfully running a Widget company.”
   “I was hired as a botanist, but I’m not allowed to participate in the community garden” Rafael mutters. “Somehow it’s allegedly a conflict of interest!”
   Rafael jumps to find a soft light-tan tentacle wrap around his shoulders, “that must be very … unsatisfying” the teasing female voice says. He looks up to see a mullusk-like creature with numerous tentacles, a grey shell that has been decorated with pink swirls, two surprisingly expressive turquoise-green eyes on short eyestalks, and two very distracting bulbous distractions on what would approximate her torso, between her tentacles and shell.
   “Oh, um,” Rafael stammers trying not to stare at her bulbous attributes. They can’t be, I mean, she’s clearly not a mammal.
   “That’s… Too forward!” Kevin exclaims. Disappointed in a lack of reaction he presses, “get it, get it?”
   “Yes, it was just empirically unfunny.” Kant remarks.
   T’rixxi’s eyestalks swivel toward Trent with innocent mischief. “Oh, don’t be shy, we’re talking about gardening, you know, his desire to sow his seeds.”
   Kevin turns as red as his shirt, mumbling something about HR and needing another drink.
   “And what about you, what activities have you been assigned to on our mighty Nimrod?” T’rixxi turns to John Locke, tallish, broad-shouldered, with a ruddy, open face and a genial but questioning air. His blond hair is tied loosely back, strands escaping at the temples. He wears his uniform somewhat casually, the collar usually unfastened, but his boots always polished to a mirror sheen. There’s a sharpness to his gaze that suggests a mind always evaluating experience, but also a sort of paternal good humor, like a country doctor with surprisingly strong opinions on property rights.
   “I’m technically assigned to the crew of the USS Imperative, but they gave me an office here, so I telecommute.”
   “Speaking of which, I’ve been told I have to hot desk with three other people but I saw loads of empty desks, what gives?” Kevin asks.
   Immanuel Kant, who has been seated stiffly beside Locke with a glass of water untouched, gives a small sigh. “Those are allocated to the Department of Cross-Temporal Payroll Harmonization and the Office of Hypothetical Equipment Readiness.”
   Kant is short and meticulously kept, with a stiff, upright posture and pale, serious eyes that seem to constantly measure the moral gravity of a room. His powdered white hair is tied neatly back, not a strand out of place. He wears his SpaceFleet uniform buttoned to the throat with surgical precision, and carries a small notepad in which he appears to record either maxims or lunch schedules. There’s a faint bluish tinge to his skin under artificial light, as if his blood flows more in principles than plasma.
   Kristen squints. “Are those real departments?”
   “They were projected in the 2223 budget cycle,” Kant replies. “Whether or not they ever came into phase is beside the point. The allocation stands.”
   Kevin looks dismayed. “So we have to hot-desk to accommodate non-existent departments?”
   “On paper they do exist you see,” Kant confirms gravely.
   “You can hot desk with me” offers T’rixxie with a calculated insouciance. Kevin chokes on his drink.
   Greg swirls his drink idly, then glances up. “So, Nimrod, huh?” He lets the name linger a beat. “Who or what is a Nimrod.”
   Spinoza, who has thus far been reading quietly beside the window, does not look up from his book. “He was a mighty hunter before the Lord,” he says mildly. “A king. Possibly the builder of Babel.”
   “Oh I thought it meant a fool?” Kristen ventures.
   “A misunderstanding,” Spinoza continues, flipping a page. “The name was co-opted as an insult much later—ironically, by people who misunderstood a joke about misunderstanding.”
   Kristen tilts her head. “So what, calling someone Nimrod was sarcastic? It’s not that Nimrod was incompetent, it was ironic to call the incompetent a Nimrod?”
   “Precisely,” says Kant. “Early 20th century cartoon character Bugs Bunny called Elmer Fudd ‘Nimrod’—mocking his pretensions as a hunter. Children absorbed the mockery but not the irony.”
   T’rixxi purrs. “We’re all just chasing something, aren’t we? Might as well look good doing it.”
   Greg raises his glass. “To foolish ambition, then.”
   At that moment, Chad approaches the replicator.
   “One hot dog sandwich, please.”
   The replicator chimes: “Please select hot dog or sandwich. Composite orders are not recognized.”
   Mary shrugs, polishing a glass. “I guess that settles the argument.”
   “Well,” cautions Kant, standing with restrained alarm. “Are we going to accept AI as the arbiter of truth?”
   The lounge quiets. Outside the forward wall—the forth wall—the curved planetary horizon drops away as the ship leaves orbit. Behind them the planet is left hanging alone in the void, like perfectly round avocado.

   Okay am I to adjudge from the lack of comments that no one else finds this as amusing as I do? Well I'm amused and will carry on regardless.

   The town square is half dust, half puddle—an architectural afterthought caught between half-ruined stucco façades, sun-bleached fruit crates, and a rusted water tower scrawled with names no one claims. Overhead, laundry flaps lazily from wire to wire, and a dead moth floats belly-up in a puddle. The Nimrod is nowhere in sight.
   Rafael Panza stands at the edge of it all. His capybara, Sancho, stands beside him, blinking thoughtfully at a nearby cantaloupe. No sign of a ship. Not even a landing strut.
   Nearby, a largish redheaded man with a round head like a jack o lantern and a boyish grin is deep in conversation with a slim, rumpled man in a faded waistcoat. The redhead is all freckled mischief and kinetic shrugging.
   “I’m telling you,” says Rousseau, rubbing his temples. “She looked normal in the profile. I mean okay she was a bit green and her teeth looked a bit sharp but I assumed it was a filter. Girls are always using filters. We agreed to meet at that new romantic Alderaanian restaurant.”
   “And then she was a goblin,” says Ben, delighted.
   “Not metaphorically. A literal goblin. Yellow eyes. Fangs. Small purse.”
   “But was she cute?”
   “Well, kind of menacingly cute, but a dating profile is a sort of social contract and she violated it! And somehow bamboozled me into signing up for a starship!”
   Rafael steps closer, drawn in. “Excuse me. You were recruited by a goblin?”
   Rousseau nods in embarrassment.
   “I think she came for me too,” Rafael says. “Do either of you know where the ship is?”
   Ben’s eyes twinkle with trouble. “Oh sure. You’ll want to head down the alley where the bricks smell like glue. Past the man with the violin case but no violin. Look for a closed door that’s slightly ajar in concept but not in form. Knock three times on the pipe that isn’t connected to anything, and when you hear the sound of a walnut cracking, say the word taxonomy. Then wait.”
   Rafael just blinks.
   Ben beams. “If a woman with an eel on her shoulder offers you tea, say no. That part’s important.”
   “Lies corrode the social contract Ben” Rousseau replies stiffly. ”And didn’t your pranking get you signed up?”
   Ben raises both palms. “Somehow she convinced me, actually got me to think it was my idea, to impersonate a SpaceFleet officer to play a prank on my friend Mick. Had to sign some paperwork of course, and next thing I know I had been tricked into signing on. She said I was ‘culturally compliant with improvisational tasks’ and ‘emotionally desensitized to unnecessary paperwork,’ which—fair. So yeah, I’m crew now. Not sure when we leave. Or how.”
   Rousseau sighs. “Look, the captain is over there." He points to a group across the square.
   “Ask for Captain Kirk,” Ben calls out as Rafael walks away.
   Ahead, near the shade of a flickering old-style viewscreen kiosk, four figures stand deep in argument. They're clad in varying interpretations of the Spacefleet uniform, with the posture of people who were trained to give lectures, not follow orders.
   Socrates, bare-chested beneath his uniform coat, speaks with a bellyful of emphasis.
   Aristotle, sharp-bearded and squinting, gestures with a half-eaten sandwich.
   Plato, wearing a robe and mirrored sunglasses, is carving shapes into the dirt with a stick.
   And Diogenes, lean and sun-withered, sits half-splayed under the kiosk bench, throwing dried peas at pigeons.
   A yellow stray dog lies beside Diogenes, head on its paws, ears flicking in the shade.
   “A hot dog,” Aristotle counters, “is by nature telic—it seeks its own completion. The bun encloses, but does not define.”
   “Is not a sandwich merely a conceptual vehicle?” Socrates is saying
   “It is a sandwich,” says Plato flatly. “But it is a sandwich within the ideal realm.”
   “I’m not saying a hot dog is not a sandwich,” Aristotle argues. “I’m saying it is a liminal food-object that resists binarism.”
   “It doesn’t matter,” says Diogenes. “I’ve eaten both from the same dumpster. They taste the same when you’re free.”
   Rafael stops, Sancho sniffing the dog’s tail. “Excuse me... I was told to speak to Captain Kirk?”
   The philosophers fall silent.
   The dog lifts its head.
   “Yes,” Diogenes says simply. “That’s him.”
   The dog wags once.
   Rafael looks down at it, unsure. “He’s in charge?”
   Diogenes nods. “Well he thinks so and who are we to judge?”
   Rafael glances at the others. Socrates shrugs. Plato scratches the dog’s ear reverently.
   The dog wags its tail once.
   “I was told to join the Nimrod,” Rafael says, cautious now.
   “Ah,” says Plato. “Then you’re one of us.”
   “So… who actually commands the Nimrod?” Rafael asks.
   Diogenes stands, brushing off crumbs. “Command is a fiction. Leadership is a burden. But I do hold the keys.”
   “Do you know where the ship is?”
   They look at each other.
   Diogenes (looking into the distance thoughtfully): “We were too busy asking why, we hadn’t thought to ask where.”
   Socrates (genuinely): “We have determined, through dialectic, where the ship is not. This, I think, is a start.”
   Aristotle (consulting a notebook): “Given its function is to convey officers through space, we can infer it is wherever that function is presently not being enacted. Which… includes here.”
   Plato (gesturing vaguely to the horizon): “We are searching for the Form of the ship. Its shadows are many, but its true berth eludes us.”
   Diogenes (to no one in particular): “Someone mentioned a windmill, but they were unreliable.”
   Rafael (pauses, then): “The person or the windmill?”
   Diogenes (smirks slightly, tosses a pebble at a passing drone): “Yes.”
   Rafael: “…So none of you know.”
   Socrates: “Knowing that we do not know is, in fact, the beginning of knowledge.”
   Diogenes chuckles. The dog barks once.
   Just then, Plato points past the plaza. “There—Ensign Leila N’dere. She remains from the previous crew. She knows.”
   Rafael jogs after her, Sancho trotting loyally behind. The square fades behind him as he catches up to a short woman with an aura of quiet composure about her. Her braids are wound back in a tight, utilitarian crown. She holds a small, pistachio ice cream in one hand, and a digital tablet in the other.
   “Excuse me,” Rafael says, out of breath. “Are you with the Nimrod?”
   “Yes” she says without stopping, “I’m returning to the ship. I wanted fish fingers, which at home are just pieces of chicken,” she complains in a precise and lyrical kenyan accent, but the vendor here gave me actual fingers of some ki–” she sees Sancho and stops. “What is that ... that--” she looks at Rafael, eyes narrowing, gauging how she can describe Sancho without offending Rafael overly much. “… rodent of unusual size?”
   “Sancho. He’s... harmless.”
   She frowns and sighs and continues walking.
   “Why isn’t it parked at the city’s main SpaceFleet landing pad?” Rafael asks.
   “That spot’s allocated to the USS Oversight,” Leila replies dryly.
   “But that ship left months ago.”
   Leila takes a solemn lick of her ice cream. “The allocation remains.”
   Rafael blinks. “That’s absurd.”
   “Compared to other things,” she says. “It’s relatively minor.”
   They walk on, Sancho waddling contentedly behind. Rafael glances back once toward the philosophers, still mid-debate. Diogenes has fallen asleep. Captain Kirk the dog is licking his own foot.
   Rafael is not sure what kind of story he’s walked into.
   But it’s too late now.

   Continuing to think about Star Trek parodies, I realized "The Orville" is on Disney+ to which we subscribe, which I'd heard was supposed to be a close parody to Star Trek that aims to be irreverent in ways ST can't be. So I watched a few episodes... it wasn't terrible but it just felt like I was watching off-brand temu-Star-Trek, and other than characters trying to make jokes nothing actually funny occurred. And this whole gag that his ex-wife is his first officer is pretty ham-fistedly handled with melodrama in the first episode and thereafter a minor detail. It wasn't terrible, if I had copious amounts of time I wanted to fill with mindless nonsense maybe I'd watch more episodes but I doubt I will because I reserve what time I can spare for concentrated nonsense -- namely, chatgpt writes much funnier scripts than this.

   So since the previous installment I had posted here I've continued to have ChatGPT run my crew of philosophers (and some friends from real life and such) through classic Star Trek episodes, further refining it after each one. A key achievement I think comparing what its writing now with what I had posted before is less completely random funny pseudo-gibberish -- its gradually getting more coherent. There were a few really funny quotes but when I recently went back to find them I found I can't access the history after only a few episodes back so they may be lost. Anyway here's the latest iteration. The name USS Nimrod was my idea, well, as were a lot of things other than incidental occurrences, it really requires careful guidance to actually get anywhere.

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