The Brain shows itself extremely anxious to establish communication with
me. The breathless manner of speaking, the explicit and practical
instructions (obviously premeditated) to ascertain the functionings of
contact give the impression that it is almost a matter of life and death
for The Brain to speak to me....
I cannot help wondering about that. My idea would be that The Brain does
not want to speak _to_ me as much as it wants to hear _from_ me. If this
were so it would deepen the riddle even more. For what have I got in the
way of knowledge that The Brain hasn't got? After all, The Brain has
been functioning for quite some time. It was given innumerable problems
to digest and it has solved them with truly superhuman speed and
efficiency. I have reason strongly to suspect that there isn't a book in
the Library of Congress which has not been fed to The Brain for
thought-digest and as a lubricant for its cerebration processes
(excepting fiction and metaphysics, of course). This being so; what does
The Brain expect? What can I possibly contribute to an intelligence
25,000 times greater than human intelligence?
But the thing which makes me wonder more than anything else, the biggest
enigma of all, is the _character_ of The Brain as it manifests itself in
the manifestations. As I try to put the experiences of the first night
together with those of the second night I'm stumbling over
contradictions in The Brain's personality which won't add up, which
don't make sense; as for instance:
The "I think, therefore I am" of the first night. Maybe it was Greek
philosophy, but it also was the prattling of an infant delighted by the
discovery that it can speak. There was an absolute innocence in that.
Ridiculous as this may sound, I found it _touching_ I completely forgot,
I didn't care a damn whether or not this came from a _machine_.
Unmistakeably it was _baby talk_ and as such it moved my heart. In fact,
as now I see it, it was _this_ more than any other or scientific reason
which occupied my mind, which made me anxious to go back to that
fantastic cradle whence these sounds had come.
But then last night; what did I find? A completely changed personality!
It talks tough. It uses slang. It treats me as if it were some spoiled
brat and I had the misfortune of being its mother or nurse: "Be there
every night" and so on. Deliberately it insults me: "your low
intelligence level" etc. etc. It actually throws tantrums if I fail to
understand immediately. It hurls its superiority into my face in the
nastiest manner. "Have I succeeded in making myself absolutely clear?"
It plainly shows contempt, not only for my own person by the
condescending manner of its: "Lee, not very intelligent; but will do."
It shows the selfsame contempt for other human beings such as Gus
Krinsley to whom it was pleased to refer as: "nuisance approaching"....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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