John von Neumann

Perhaps the aliens tried that already and the experiment failed, so they tried again.

One idea that was quite influential is an idea of von Neumann, the genius that developed the first computer.

He worked on the Manhattan Project and so forth.

One of his ideas was just a year before DNA was discovered, around 1950, he suggested the idea of self-replicating systems, meaning a system that can reproduce itself.

Nature is full of them.

That's what we call life, you know, with the DNA as the genetic code.

Von Neumann also thought about systems that are artificially constructed.

We haven't built a robot that can build a robot, But we might do that eventually.

But then, in 1932, they hit what looked like an insurmountable mathematical roadblock.

Enter John von Neumann.

Right.

Von Neumann was one of the most formidable mathematicians of the 20th century.

And in 1932, he published this foundational book on the mathematics of quantum mechanics.

And he included a proof in there, didn't he?

Let's pause there for a second.

Because in science, you can't just declare an entire philosophical school of thought dead without some serious bulletproof math.

Obviously, he was suspicious of me as well, because he was like, you're one of those speciesists.

And he said, you know, I think that what you don't understand, Mustafa, is that by the end of the century, I'm going to be exploring the galaxies at the head of a von Neumann probe.

which means a von Neumann probe is a kind of self-propelling kind of robot that is able to gather energy from space as it's careening through the light years.

And being at the head of that kind of probe would be, obviously, his

transitioned...

And in the end, my thesis was in probability theory, but McCulloch was my guru.

But his big interest at the time was based on a possibly apocryphal conversation with John von Neumann.

And John von Neumann apparently had said to him, Warren, I've drunk a whole bottle of absinthe, but my brain still works.

How can that be? And von Neumann had published a theory of reliable computation in unreliable networks in a book called Automata Studies, edited by Shannon and McCarthy, that I had read before I left Sydney and that was contemporaneous and had an overlap in personnel with the people who put together McCarthy, obviously, and Shannon, too, at the famous Dartmouth conference that initiated artificial intelligence as we used to know it.

what you might call a postdoc, except he hadn't got a doctorate yet, a guy named Jack Cowan, who was working on a mathematical theory of how do you take Shannon's theory and transform it from a theory of communication to a theory of computation.

A formula, a theory, an abstract structure feels as solid as the desk in front of you.

There are many stories about John von Neumann, the 20th century mathematician, working through complicated calculations in his head faster than the early computers he helped design.

For minds like his, the abstract isn't abstract anymore.

It's a landscape.

who just died a few years back.

And he wrote a paper about the upcoming technological singularity, and he was actually borrowing the term from John von Neumann,

who

was one of the most brilliant mathematicians.

But a lot of the times, I think the key is practice immersion.

We talk about immersion in a foreign language, but in the math, There's this great line, who knows if it's true, but it's attributed to John von Neumann, where a student says about some concept, a professor I don't understand.

And von Neumann says, young men in mathematics, you don't understand things, you get used to them.

And so I love that line because I think that fits in with this sort of practice and procedural knowledge more than declarative knowledge.