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“There are only two kinds 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 plays the main role in his latest novel MANIAC.
In “A Terrible Greenness” – the book that made him known worldwide after his selection as a finalist for the Booker Prize International 2021 – Labatut had already addressed the ambiguities and paradoxes of 20th century science and scientists.
But in his latest work, titled with the acronym of the computer that Von Neumann created (Mathematic TOAnalyzer Numeric Yointegrator and TOautomatically CComputers) all the scientific advances of the last few decades seem to converge in a single brain, that of the Hungarian mathematician.
Von Neumann participated in the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb; Along with Alan Turing, he is considered the father of computer science; He was one of the founders of game theory and the strategy behind the Cold War, and yet his name remains unnoticed by the vast majority.
The mathematician, who replaced the Jancsi of his birth with a much more American John during his exile in the United States, is described by the Chilean author as “a man of enormous complexity.”
And to deal with this, Labatut does what he has never done before: he uses many people to talk about one (in addition to Wigner, 14 other people describe stages in 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 attending the HAY Festival in Cartagena, which takes place in this Colombian city from January 25 to 17, 28.
Why then did Von Neumann’s character need “this stream of voices”?
Because von Neumann demands something different.
The wonders that other scientists have discovered are generally limited to one area.
They are geniuses in physics or mathematics, they discovered a monster in 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 his thinking has not touched, and many of his ideas still have an impact.
They talk to people who study the way cancer cells communicate and they apply Von Neumann equations, a pure mathematician.
I would actually have liked to use a narrator because I'm more interested in the ideas of the classic novel than the techniques. And yet here it was impossible.
It's a half-lesson from the previous book, in which mathematician Alexander Grothendieck says that the more complex an object is, the more viewpoints are necessary to look at it.
In Neumann’s case, this is 100% true.
It's something so colossal that the only way to not captivate it and not devalue it through a single, simplistic authoritarian perspective was to refrain.
At the beginning of the novel, you – who draw on 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”. “How is your intelligence superior to all others?
There are two fundamental aspects.
The first is speed… unparalleled… inhuman speed.
Von Neumann built the first modern computer, which became the basis of all computers, and these somehow gave us a similar perspective to his on things: this immediate ability to calculate, calculate.
Your mind is synonymous with computers.
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Subtitle,
Benjamín Labatut was born in 1980 in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
The second is abstraction and logic.
Von Neumann was able to look at something from a logical perspective and that makes it possible to do wonderful things.
For example, you sit down and say, “Well, how would a self-reproducing organism work,” whether mechanical or biological, and you put the equations on paper.
And you can see in his text how RNA and DNA work, more or less 10 years before we knew about it.
It remains deeply puzzling to me that mathematical logic shows us these things.
They say there seems to be no area he hasn't touched, his biographer calls him “the forgotten Einstein” and in Christopher Nolan's film “Oppenheimer” he's 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. It's not easy to understand.
If you try to explain to a child what the Holy Spirit is, he or she will not understand. Then you tell him, the Father and the Son, and he understands.
In this trinity, the father is Albert Einstein and considering where the 21st century is heading, the son could be Turing. But the Holy Spirit is Von Neumann.
He is someone who operates on all levels and is therefore so large that he is invisible, but he is involved in every aspect of the modern world.
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Subtitle,
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, but 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 achieved in pure mathematics was also colossal.
For example, at the age of 14, he does research under a mathematician, and that mathematician devotes the rest of his career to developing the field that von Neumann invented in a school assignment.
This happens over and over again. Arrive, touch an area and move on. And then people have to start figuring out what he showed us.
In the book, von Neumann's first wife appears and says that he is useless in practical matters. 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 “descendants”, and the best example we currently have are systems like ChatGPT that process all the information in the world, but nothing understand.
It is a type of intelligence that is disconnected 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 obligation…or a sacrifice.
In other words, if you are a great athlete who has had to devote every second of your life to cultivating your body, you will have gaps elsewhere.
This is what happens to von Neumann's intelligence: when it is sharpened to such an extent, when it becomes so sharp, it interacts with a smaller and smaller area of reality.
And the miracle of human intelligence is the generality that serves to wash dishes, to hug, to know how to get out of the way on the street when someone is walking, and to understand others in that intuitive way that it allows us to live with millions and millions of others. People.
This daily life that those of us who are not geniuses lead is a continuous beauty that we do not need to pay much attention to in order to function.
But someone with overdeveloped reason and a brutal capacity for abstraction will have a very difficult time going to a birthday party, celebrating Christmas, or cooking breakfast.
It's the same thing we've learned now as we develop systems or robots to do these things, and we realize that the hardest part is not that they aim at a plane in the stratosphere, but that they know how you pick up a cup from the table.
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Subtitle,
US President Dwight Eisenhower presented Von Neumann with the Medal of Freedom in 1956.
In an interview with BBC Mundo two years ago, you quoted a sentence from Neumann that said science is useful for all purposes but indifferent to everything. Is this then an amoral intelligence, or do categories such as moral and immoral, ethical and unethical, make no 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 at all. The problem is different. 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 can see about reality that we cannot.
Because we all believe that we see the world more or less the same, but that's not necessarily the case.
And that doesn't just apply to people like him.
For example, if you study the great masters of Eastern thought, the perspectives they have on reality are not the same as your 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 there is a mechanism installed in your mind that presents everything to you in categories of things good or bad, beautiful or ugly.
And these moral judgments do not mean that they are unimportant, but rather that they highlight one area.
The great moral teachers of the West – Christ, Nietzche, Kant – taught us a way to be human.
But there are times when you have to turn them off, Christ, Kant, not all the time, but you have to be able to see the world without those filters.
Putting yourself in other forms of human beings is just as fundamental as seeing the world through mathematics or physics, for example.
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Von Neumann is involved in the development of the atomic bomb on the one hand and in the development of computer science on the other. You say in the book that humanity's most creative moment coincided with its most destructive moment.
Do you think it is a temporary coincidence or is it due to a whole situation that characterizes this very complex half of the 20th century?
First of all, it is very important to clarify that George Dyson said this in Turin Cathedral, which was one of my main sources.
Dyson presents a series of basic metaphors like this, in which he says that humanity's most creative and destructive inventions essentially emerge at the same moment and reinforce each other.
Of course these are not coincidences.
It's something deeply mysterious that I don't know if it comes from humanity or is somewhat anchored in the way reality works.
We see it now with artificial intelligence. People think about miracles, about a world like we have never known, and at the same time about the extinction of humanity.
These types of accounts are the ones that attract me because they never have a simple answer; They are, by their very nature, a contradiction.
And for me literature is that; It is one of the aspects that humans have created to deal with paradoxes and embrace them, which is the only thing you can do.
In books I engage with science, its language and its metaphors, to interact with what seems to me to be the most fundamental, namely mysticism, the study of mystery from which there is no safe path and from which one cannot escape immediately , if it is so very close.
And I don't pick on scientists because they're 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 very fragile and the brain is not designed to withstand contradictions.
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Subtitle,
Jhon von Neumann found refuge in the United States and helped other scientists like him escape Nazism in Europe.
In your essay “The Stone of Madness” you say that the emergence of the new is a traumatic process that only shocks us, and that perhaps the only answer is to find new ones in the rubble left by the collapse of the great narratives to find stories. MANIAC concludes precisely with artificial intelligence. I would like to ask you how we deal with this new phenomenon.
There is always only one possible path when people reach a limit: kill or die.
Not only are we developing these little demigods of rationality, but at the same time we are developing all of our dark matter, which is the most important thing. We should not forget that.
These mechanisms we create are deeply powerful and mysterious, but the great knowledge of humans is all unconscious.
What keeps you alive, what keeps us as a human phenomenon, all of this arises from the unconscious and will always remain a mystery to the individual.
No matter how far science or algorithms advance, we will always remain a mystery to ourselves, and others will always remain a mystery to us.
So what tools do we use to explore the darkness? It can't just be science. And I see a regrowth of everything around me.
When people at 70 start saying, “Benjamín, how about we have some mushrooms in the mountains?”, it's because people, even the most conservative ones, understand that it's time to grow things , which were left aside.
We will not save ourselves with reason alone. Because we've never done it before. This is absolute ignorance, it means not understanding how things work.
(The Chilean poet) Nicanor Parra has already said it: We are an offspring of angel and animal. And you have to know when to be with the angel and when with the beast.
We have neglected the animal and associate it only with that which is destructive.
But it is there, it inhabits us, it is us. And being locked in the apartment for a long time is very bad for them. You have to take it outside.
Back to Von Neumann: After reading and writing about his life and work, do you feel like you know more or less about him?
Look, the reason literature has become such a happy thing for me is because I push my limited understanding as far as I can.
Since I was not given mathematics – which I consider a divine gift – I am very limited to words, to what language can understand.
And I've had a pretty thorough education in the irrational.
From this standpoint, Von Neuman is one of the saints on my altar. And I always have more. With each book I collect a different one.
The perspectives such people can give you about yourself and the world are truly a gift.
I'm not trying to understand Von Neumann. I want to be infected and possessed, I want a part of his mind to creep into mine.
If not, there is no point in writing. If it's just a writing exercise, that's why I'm doing a biography.
You have to eat a small piece of Von Neumann like in the fair. This is how it gets into your DNA.
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