2024-01-21 04:43:18
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“There are only two types of people in this world: Jancsi von Neumann and the rest of us.”
This is how – says the Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut – the Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner described his compatriot Von Neumann, the mathematician who stars in his latest novel, MANIAC.
In “A Terrible Greenness” – the book that made him known worldwide following its selection as a finalist for the Booker Prize International 2021 – Labatut had already delved into the obscurities and paradoxes of science and scientists of the 20th century.
But in his latest work, titled with the acronym of the computer that Von Neumann created (Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer), all the scientific advances of recent decades seem to come together in a single brain, that of the Hungarian mathematician.
Von Neumann participated in the Manhattan project, which developed the nuclear bomb; He is considered, along with Alan Turing, the father of computing; He was one of the creators of Game Theory and the strategy behind the Cold War, and yet, his name goes unnoticed by the vast majority.
The mathematician, who during his exile in the United States changed the Jancsi of his birth for a much more American John, is defined by the Chilean author as “a guy of enormous complexity.”
And to delve into it, Labatut does what he had never done before: he uses many people to talk regarding one (in addition to Wigner, 14 other people describe stages of John Von Neumann’s life).
“Actually, I don’t like the noise of voices, I don’t really enjoy it,” he told BBC Mundo from Chile before participating in the HAY Festival of Cartagena, which takes place in that Colombian city between the 25th and the January 28.
Why, then, did Von Neumann’s character need “that stream of voices”?
Because Von Neumann requires something different.
The miracles that other scientists have discovered are generally limited to one area.
They are geniuses in physics or mathematics, they discovered a monster within an equation, they opened our vision of the world to a specific area.
But Von Neumann is unique in that there is virtually no area of modern science that he has not touched with his thinking, and many of his ideas continue to have impact.
You talk to people who are studying the way cancer cells communicate and they are applying Von Neumann equations, a pure mathematician.
I actually would have liked to use a narrator, because I am more interested in the ideas than the techniques of the classic novel. And yet, here it was impossible.
It is a lesson half taken from the previous book, in which the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck says that the more complex an object is, the more points of view are necessary to see it.
In the case of Von Neumann that applies 100%.
It is something so colossal that the only way not to tie it down, not to diminish it with a single, simplistic authoritarian perspective, was the chorus.
At the beginning of the novel, you – who appeals to fiction – define him as “the most intelligent man of the 20th century”, while his biographer Ananyo Bhattacharya – who writes from non-fiction – calls him “the man of the future.” In what way is his intelligence superior to all others?
There are two fundamental aspects.
The first is speed… an incomparable… inhuman speed.
Von Neumann built the first modern computer, which became the basis of all computers, and these have somehow given us a perspective similar to the one he had on things: that immediate capacity, computation, calculation.
Your mind is synonymous with computing.
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Caption,
Benjamín Labatut was born in 1980 in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
The second is abstraction and logic.
Von Neumann was able to take something and look at it in logical aspects, and that allows you to do wonderful things.
For example, you sit down and say, “Well, how any self-replicating organism would have to work,” whether mechanical or biological, and you put the equations on paper.
And you can see in his text the functioning of RNA and DNA, more or less 10 years before we knew regarding them.
So to me that remains deeply mysterious, that mathematical logic shows us these things.
You say that it seems that there is no area that he has not touched, his biographer calls him “the forgotten Einstein” and in the film “Oppenheimer”, by Christopher Nolan, he is the great absentee. If he was in everything, how come his name seems lost?
Because it is like the Holy Spirit, it is the third divine person who is everywhere and nowhere. He is not easily understood.
If you try to explain to a child what the Holy Spirit is, they will not understand it. Then you tell him, the father and the son, and he does understand that.
In this trinity, the father is Albert Einstein and, considering where the 21st century is going, the son might be Turing. But the holy spirit is Von Neumann.
He is someone who operates at every level, and therefore is so big that he is invisible, but he is involved in every aspect of the modern world.
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Caption,
Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan project, and Von Neumann, in 1952.
We must also recognize that our understanding is limited. We do not have the intellectual tools to understand most of their contributions.
I wrote hundreds of pages, because I wanted to touch everything, and it was impossible. I don’t know how many I had to take for obvious reasons: I – and most people – don’t understand pure mathematics, but what he did in pure mathematics was also colossal.
For example, at the age of 14 he does research with a mathematician, and that mathematician dedicates the rest of his career to developing the area that Von Neumann had invented in a paper at school.
That happens over and over once more. She arrives, touches an area and moves on. And then people have to start trying to see what it was that he showed us.
In the book Von Neumann’s first wife appears saying that, in practical matters, he was useless. How is an “inhuman” intelligence inserted into the everyday world?
I believe that the best way to understand Von Neumann is to start analyzing his “progeny”, and the best example we have now are systems like ChatGPT, which handle all the information in the world, but understand nothing.
It is a type of intelligence that is decoupled from things that seem obvious to the rest of us. It is not that they are ignorant, but that they have no experience in the most basic aspects of existence, the most essential.
It’s a kind of commitment… or a sacrifice.
In other words, if you are a tremendous athlete, who has had to dedicate every second of your life to cultivating your body, you are going to have holes elsewhere.
This is what happens with Von Neumann’s intelligence: when it is sharpened to that point, when it becomes so sharp, it interacts with an increasingly smaller area of reality.
And the wonder of human intelligence is generality, which is used to wash dishes, to hug, to know how to move out of the way on the street when someone is walking, to understand others in these intuitive ways that allow us to coexist with millions and millions of others. people.
This daily life that those of us who are not geniuses live is a continuous beauty, to which we do not have to pay much attention to be able to operate.
But a person who has overdeveloped reason, a brutal capacity for abstraction, will find it very difficult to go to a birthday party, celebrate Christmas, or cook breakfast.
It is the same thing that we have learned now that we are developing systems or robots to do these things, and we realize that the most difficult thing is not that they aim at a plane in the stratosphere, but that they know how to pick up a cup from the table .
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Caption,
US President Dwight Eisenhower presented the “Medal of Freedom” to Von Neumann in 1956.
In an interview with BBC Mundo two years ago, you cited a phrase by Von Neumann that says that science is something useful for any purpose, but indifferent to everything. Is it then an amoral intelligence, or is it that categories such as moral and immoral, ethical or unethical, do not make sense when we apply them to a mind like yours?
No, the criteria of morality and ethics always make sense.
Von Neumann is not amoral, not at all. The problem is another. The problem is what a mind like yours can see of the world.
What we should ask ourselves, when faced with people like him, is what they are capable of seeing regarding reality that we are not capable of.
Because we all believe that we see the world more or less the same, but that is not necessarily the case.
And it’s something that doesn’t just apply to people like him.
When one studies the great masters of Eastern thought, for example, the perspectives they have on reality are not the same as one’s own, they do not see the individual or consciousness in the same way.
One of the first things you learn when you start meditating seriously is that you have a mechanism installed in your head that presents everything to you in categories of things good or bad, pretty or ugly.
And those moral judgments are not that they are not important, but they show you only one area.
The great moral teachers of the West – Christ, Nietzche, Kant – have taught us a way of being human.
But there are times when one has to turn them off, turn off Christ, Kant, not continuously, but you have to be able to see the world without those filters.
Putting yourself in the head of other forms of human being is as fundamental as seeing the world, for example, from mathematics or physics.
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Von Neumann participates, on the one hand, in the creation of the nuclear bomb and, on the other, in the development of computing. You say in the book that the most creative moment of humanity has coincided with its most destructive moment.
Do you think it is a temporary coincidence or is it due to an entire situation that is that very complex half of the 20th century?
First, it is very important to clarify that George Dyson said this in “The Cathedral of Turin”, which was one of my main sources.
Dyson presents a series of fundamental metaphors like that where he says that humanity’s most creative and most destructive inventions arise basically at the same moment and enhance each other.
Of course they are not coincidences.
It is something deeply mysterious, that I don’t know if it arises from humanity or is something that is a little encoded in how reality operates.
We are seeing it now with artificial intelligence. People are contemplating miracles, a world like we have never known, and at the same time the extinction of humanity.
These types of balances are the ones that attract me, because they do not have any simple answer, ever; They are a contradiction in their essence.
And literature for me is that; It is one of the aspects that humans have created to deal with paradox, to embrace it, which is the only thing one can do.
In books I deal with science, its language and its metaphors to interact with what seems most fundamental to me, which is mysticism, the study of mystery, for which there is no safe path and from which one does not come out the same if It’s very close.
And I don’t choose scientists because they are crazy; I do it because they are people who have dared to embrace with both hands what burns, what burns, what breaks your head into a thousand pieces.
Because our heads are built in a very fragile way, and the brain is not made to withstand contradiction.
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Caption,
Jhon von Neumann found refuge in the United States and helped other scientists like him escape from Nazism in Europe.
In your essay “The Stone of Madness” you say that the emergence of the new is a traumatic process that only leaves us shaking, and that perhaps the only answer is to find new stories in the rubble left by the collapse of the great narratives. MANIAC closes precisely with artificial intelligence. I want to ask you how we deal with this new phenomenon.
There is only one possible path every time human beings face a limit: kill or die.
Not only do we develop these little demigods of rationality, but at the same time we develop all of our dark matter, which is the most important thing. We must not forget that.
These mechanisms that we are creating are deeply powerful and mysterious, but the great knowledge of human beings is all unconscious.
What keeps you alive, what keeps us as a human phenomenon, all of that springs from the unconscious and that will always be a mystery for the individual.
No matter how much science or algorithms advance, we will always be a mystery to ourselves, and others will always be a mystery to us.
So what are the tools with which we probe the darkness? It can’t just be science. And I see a regrowth of everything around me.
When people who are 70 years old start telling you “Benjamín, how regarding we have some mushrooms in the mountains” it is because people, even the most conservative ones, understand that the time has come to grow things that have been left aside.
We are not going to save ourselves with reason alone. Because we have never done it. That is absolute ignorance, it is not understanding how things work.
(Chilean poet) Nicanor Parra already said it: we are a graft of angel and beast. And you have to know when to be with the angel and when with the beast.
We have neglected the beast and only associate it with what is destructive.
However, it is there, it inhabits us, it is us. And being locked up in the apartment for a long time is very bad for her. You have to take it outside.
Returning to Von Neumann: following reading and writing regarding his life and work, do you feel like you know more or less regarding him?
Look, the reason why literature has become such a happy thing for me is because I push my limited understanding as far as I can.
Since I have not been given mathematics – which I see as a divine gift – I am very limited to words, to what language can understand.
And I have done a fairly thorough education in the irrational.
From that point of view, Von Neuman is one of the saints on my altar. And I have more and more. With each book I collect another.
The perspectives that people like this can give you regarding yourself and the world are truly a gift.
I don’t try to understand Von Neumann. What I want is to be infected, possessed, I want part of his spirit to sneak into mine.
If not, there is no point in writing. If it’s just a writing exercise, that’s why I make a biography.
You have to eat a little piece of Von Neumann like at mass. This is how it gets into your DNA.
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