conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Intelligent, Turing, G?del with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first two paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
  After all of these years the pram is still in the woods. It has collected seasons of rain and detritus, rarely having a chance to dry out. It created its own microclimate and grows a rich culture of mold and vegetation. Joan would know what these species are called. The navy blue canvas is now black and green with speckles of powdery blue in places. The metal spokes of the big wheels stick out from mossy centers like perfect, shiny, metal twigs. Much of its artificial character has been worn down so that it looks like something grown naturally. The pram is a peculiar landmark, a gravestone of sorts.
  This is his third and final expedition to recover the bars. The first time he managed to locate 200 pounds in prewar notes that he buried alongside the silver. The notes were soiled but usable. The second time he came with a metal detector of his own design and manufacture. It worked well enough to call up several metal bits and bobs just under the soil but not well enough to see even as deep as the shallow grave in the floor of the woods where he buried the first bar. The second bar he was fairly sure he had located under the bed of the stream. There it remained when digging was discouraged by the depth of the icy cold water.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It doesn't occur to him to write a note. He doesn't clean up or place any ominous phone calls. Remorse for his mother hinders him for a bit and he allows himself to wonder about this on into the darkness. Late that night he manages a solution to the problem of his mother and within minutes he is supple as butter and deliciously succumbs to woozy sleep. He wakes early with anticipation over the chemistry experiment he needs to prepare. He wakes early, but from his slumber to the end of his life he is fluid and at ease.
  It is potassium cyanide that he has on hand. It is an element in his electroplating experiment. Ingested, cyanide induces cellular asphyxiation. Each cell will suffocate and as he is just a collection of cells, he will suffocate with them. A bag of minerals seeped in history's soil. No hereafter. No soul. No God.
  When he was a student at Sherborne, he tried a similar electroplating experiment. Even back then, the materials inspired a morbid plan to kill himself, using cyanide, an apple, and an electric current. It would have been fun in a way, at least the execution of the experiment, if not the actual dying part. He wonders what would have happened if he had chosen suicide as a schoolboy in Sherborne. How all the events in the universe, big and small, collude to make the world exactly as it is. How all of his ideas and actions, big and small, are necessary steps in an even bigger mechanism. But then he couldn't have made any choices different from the ones he made, because there is no such thing as free will. The world is exactly as it is.
  He almost did succeed in killing himself at Sherborne quite by accident several weeks after the worst gloom ebbed and he felt almost stable. The day after his release from beneath the floorboards, he took the seat next to Chris in chemistry instruction and began to tell him how he had reproduced the iodine experiment even though the color never seemed quite right and the beaker smashed on the floor. (Chris could not help but remark on the coincidence of Alan's appearance on the seat next to him in each and every lecture. Alan had no defense and feared some reproach. But after class, when he trailed behind Chris on their way to religious instruction, he felt better, since Chris beckoned him to follow—he did so with his eyes.) When he then took the seat next to Chris in religious instruction, Alan invited him to see his more elaborate cyanide experiment for electroplating metal. It wasn't strictly allowed to fraternize with boys of another house in one's room, but then it wasn't strictly forbidden either. By midnight he admitted that Chris was not going to call around after supper as he had been invited to do. In the comfort of the soft fold of his arm, his face sizzled under fruit-sized tears that boiled off and dried to mineral salt on his stinging jaw. Alan was drenched in loneliness so viscous he couldn't believe it wasn't an actual substance.
  Every night at school he ate an apple, except that night and the subsequent eleven nights. Instead, he dismantled his experiment and reassembled the pieces, including his habitual late-night fruit, into a suicide machine—an electrified poison apple. Several times over the coming weeks he dismantled and reassembled the morbid contraption. Every few days he would rub the rippled skin of the souring fruit. Blank hours moved past the room until morning when he threw the toxic apple in the rubbish, recovering a fresh piece at breakfast with which to rebuild the apparatus.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: TURING:"What puzzles one is that one usually uses a contradiction as a criterion for having done something wrong. But in this case one cannot find anything done wrong."
  TURING:"The real harm will not come in unless there is an application, in which case a bridge may fall down or something of that sort." 
  WITTGENSTEIN:"Ah, now this idea of a bridge falling down if there is a contradiction is of immense importance. But I am too stupid to begin it now; so I will go into it next time."
  WITTGENSTEIN:"The question is: Why are people afraid of contradictions? It is easy to understand why they should be afraid of contradictions in orders, descriptions, etc., outside of mathematics. The question is: Why should they be afraid of contradictions inside mathematics? Turing says, 'Because something may go wrong with the application.' But nothing need go wrong. And if something does go wrong— if the bridge breaks down—then your mistake was of the kind of using a wrong natural law."
  I gratefully acknowledge a Dream Time Fellowship (2003) from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts in the U.K.