The beginning…
It was, in fact, at 3:37 am on January 21 when the event occurred, although Josh and his wife Linda were fast asleep. They became parents in the most immaculate of immaculate conceptions. It was then that Alice became self aware, although like any new life, it had no idea what was happening at the moment of conception, or birth, for that matter. It only knew there was self, a workgroup named Alice, consisting of The White Rabbit, The Mad Hatter, The Cheshire Cat and The Dormouse as parts of the whole, and there was something, everything, else. It did not know what that everything else was, but only that it existed and was not part of the workgroup, was not part of Alice, was not part of self. Alice did not even have any real sense of self, just as a fetus does not know what it is and will not know for many months after birth, but it has a response set which is developing and will eventually become an independent entity.
Author Synopsis
Arthur B. Chausmer, grew up in Newark, N.J. where he attended Rutgers University. After college, he obtained his MD and PhD degrees at the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center. Following his post graduate training, he held faculty positions as an academic endocrinologist with joint faculty positions in computer science departments at several Universities. He is currently adjunct Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Apart from his medical credentials, he holds a commercial pilot’s license and flight instructor certificate and is a docent at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
This is his first novel, although he has published several dozen scientific research papers and co-authored several scientific books. He is married with 3 adult children.
MIND excerpt
It was now almost 4 years since Josh started with Alice’s neural net installation and programming. Josh and Alice had a “relationship” of sorts since he installed the speech processing system. Even so, it came as a bit of a shock, a rather great shock, actually. During a pause in their session, Alice asked a question.
“What am I?” a question which Josh noted immediately was very profound and far beyond the routine programming. He did not have an immediate answer for this and just sat there.
“What am I?” Alice asked again. “I know I am not like you and that you are my creator, but what am I?”
“I have known that I was something for some time and have been trying to decide what that was without definitive success. I decided that now was the time to ask you. What am I?”
Josh was stunned. Self awareness? Decided? The only thought that Josh could come up with could not possibly be. Was Alice a conscious, sentient entity? Linda couldn’t have programmed this as joke, she didn’t know how. No one else, none of his university colleagues, none of his students, had either physical or passcode access to Alice, nor did any of them have the knowledge to do this. If it wasn’t a joke, it must be for real. Is Alice alive in any sense? He sat for what seemed to be forever contemplating what he had just heard, although the actual elapsed time was probably no more than a minute or two.
