4 ms·

Reality is multicausal. Neumann could divide 8-digit numbers in his head when he was 8-years old. At age 8 he already mastered basic differential and integral

• tshaddox 5y ago
  > Reality is multicausal. Or perhaps there are no causes at all, and the laws of physics are deterministic and time reversible. Perhaps causes appear only in our models of predicting the world, because our models contain agents and counterfactuals which don’t exist in the laws of physics but are useful for predicting some phenomena.
  • MichaelBurge 5y ago
    Deterministic time-reversible things can still have causality. Just today I used gdb's reversible-debugging feature on a deterministic program to locate a bug. The existence of a bug implies causality in the program's execution state.
    • GavinMcG 5y ago
      Deterministic time-reversible things could still have causality in a universe that has causality. But that's not an effective response to the claim that there's no causality at all.
    • tshaddox 5y ago
      I suppose you could still talk about causes in a deterministic time-reversible system, but it doesn’t match the normal sense of the word “cause” given that future states determine past states just as much as past states determine future states.
• dav_Oz 5y ago
  Getting better and better at solving problems (here: in a broad range of mathematics) at an unconventional rate makes it uncanny. It seems like magic. As everyone doing magic tricks knows there is a lot of effort going into a good one. The "innate abilities" or "genius" is the "magic" we all like to experience. In the case of "von Neumann" he isn't isolated. He is often lumped together with other Hungarian Jews fleeing Nazism and refered to as A marslakók ("The Martians"): Erdős, Kármán, Pólya, Szilárd, Teller, Wigner ... Hungarians are a curious bunch, aren't they? Arguably the strongest female chess player of all time (in the same class as the strongest men) is also Hungarian: Judit Polgár. How do they do it? There is no magic, no genius, her Hungarian father wanted to prove exactly this to the (western) world (in the east the notion isn't prevalent). And he simply conducted the experiment[0] consequently his youngest daughter became a so-called chess genius. Or as a Korean or Chinese might say she is doing the hard work. We all like to tell ourselves stories and it is fine, it is a great and very effective way to convey certain things but sometimes we lose sight of what is really going on because of our infatuation with the narrative devices. Instead of learning and trying to explain things, we sometimes just want to indulge in the "magic moments". But as Feynman put it nicely: you can do both one doesn't exclude the other. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r
  • mjreacher 5y ago
    Wigner himself said the only genius amongst The Martians was von Neumann so he at least thought von Neumann was special compared to the others. For your example a mathematician who would fit better would be Norbert Wiener, who was taught from a young age by his father to be a prodigy.
    • dr_dshiv 5y ago
      Norbert Wiener! Love that guy. Cant wait for cybernetics to make a comeback. Gonna go look for cyber*.com names now…
  • kaba0 5y ago
    I don’t think it is far fetched to claim that such a complex system as the human brain has a genetic basis regarding intelligence as well, especially towards outliers of the IQ bell curve. For example, Ashkenazi Jews have very specific neurological diseases, but those same genes could also give much increased intelligence when they are paired with their normal counterparts. Here is a very interesting blog post on an investigation behind “The Martians” for example: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid... which basically finds this same reason for their “superhuman” intelligence.