INTERIM READER'S REPORT

I am ordinarily a pretty fast reader, but the book I am now reading, Turing's Cathedral, is astonishingly slow going.  After plugging away at it conscientiously for a while, I am only on page 137!  Still and all, it has some rather interesting things in it, aside from endless detail about the backgrounds, ancestors, and personal characteristics of each one of the scores, if not hundreds, of characters who make their appearance in the story.  The book is about the early stages of the development of the modern computer, a development in which John von Neumann played a central role.

The core of the theory of the computer can be found in the writings of Leibniz, and in the modern era, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and -- surprisingly, Kurt Gödel -- pretty well had that nailed early on.  But the actual construction of a working model turned out to be an engineering nightmare.  The enterprise was launched at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, with von Neumann and several others overseeing the effort.  Many of the ethereal residents of the Institute looked with great disfavor on the entire project, which involved engineers who actually did things with their hands other than erasing symbols from a blackboard.  The most eminent of the humanists, the great art historian Erwin Panofsky, was apparently particularly put out by the presence of engineers.

This entire story is something that I knew nothing about [hence my decision to read the book], and aside from the endless detail, which George Dyson cannot stop himself from retailing, there are some real surprises for me.  Perhaps the thing I most totally failed to realize is that the engineers [and the theorists] had to deal with the fact that the electronic components they were able to get their hands on -- vacuum tubes, relays, and the like -- were very unreliable.

Now, this unreliability posed a major threat to the very possibility of a working computer.  The problem is this [I have the feeling I am telling you something you all know, but since I have just learned it, let me continue]:  As Leibniz foresaw, a computer essentially does certain very elementary things over and over again with blinding speed,  remembering [so to speak] the result of each step, and entering that as input into the next step.  To illustrate with a trivial example, a computer adds 5 and 7 by adding 5 and 1, then taking the result, which is 6, and adding 1 to that, then taking the result, which is 7, and adding 1 to that, and so on, until it arrives at the answer, which is 12.  [I choose the example, of course, in honor of the memory of Immanuel Kant.]  Now, when thousands of steps are being concatenated, if somewhere along the line a vacuum tube misfires or misbehaves, the entire process will yield a wrong answer.

Some way must be found to get satisfactory results from imperfect, fallible components.  And this problem, much to my surprise, was one that Norbert Wiener and others had already been struggling with in their effort to devise ways of making anti-aircraft guns more accurate when fired at enemy bombers!

I am of course typing this on a desk-top computer, in preparation for posting it on my blog.  The interaction between my brain, my fingers, and the computer is seamless [save for the fact that I am the world's worst typist, and must repeatedly backtrack and correct my typing errors -- but even that is made easier by the fact that my word processing program very politely underlines in red each word that has been garbled by my errant forefingers.]  We all know that the amount of memory required, and the speed required, for this seamless process is staggering.  But it is good, nevertheless, I find, to read about the struggles of the men and women who actually invented and physically assembled the first primitive computers.  It may have been obvious to Leibniz or Turing or von Neumann or Wiener or Gödel how the first and simplest steps would lead necessarily to the most sophisticated advanced computer operations, but the actual physical steps were not obvious to them or to anyone else, and required a very great deal of effort by a large number of superbly talented people.

This might be a good place to respond to a comment posted by Don Schneier several days ago, on the occasion of my first remarks about the Dyson book.  I have been mulling them over in my mind, and there are a few things I want to say by way of elaboration and response.  Reacting to my fantasies about having a mind like that of von Neumann, Dr. Schneier writes [Don is an old student, which is how I know to write "Dr."]:  "On the one hand, there is Spinoza's distinction between 'Intuition' and 'Reason'. But, on the other, "blinding speed" may indicate a difference in rate, not in kind, of intellectual process."

This is actually directly apposite to what I have been saying.  A computer does function by performing elementary operations over and over and blinding speed.  But though it is of course the case that von Neumann's mind worked a lot faster than mine [to put it mildly] -- indeed, if Dyson is to be believed, a lot faster than just about everybody's mind, except maybe Gödel's -- that is not, I think, the real difference between his mind and mine.

Let me try to explain to illustrate what I take to be the difference by means of a story that I think I actually told in some chapter of my Autobiography.  My favorite uncle was Dr. Anoch Lewart, the husband of my father's sister, Rosabelle.  In addition to being a fine surgeon and a wonderful man, Anoch was an intellectual.  He loved to read, and for many years was part of a reading group that also included my father.  Late in life, Anoch began to lose his peripheral vision [I forget what this condition is called], and eventually it reached the point at which he could only see what was in the very center of his visual field, under bright light.  He quite literally could not see a line of text, or even an entire word.  He had made for himself a reading box, I might call it -- a box that backlit a very much enlarged text under very intense light.  Anoch could only see a part of a word at a time, but he would laboriously scan a text, word by word, remembering what he had just seen and assembling it into a sentence.  In this way, very, very slowly, he could read entire paragraphs or even pages of text.  You can perhaps see that in a sense, he was reduced to doing what a computer does, but very, very slowly.

I thought about him once when I was in the Louvre in Paris.  I was walking through one of those seemingly interminable series of galleries, and as I passed through an arch, I glanced to my right.  There, hanging on a wall, quite unpretentiously, was one of my favorite paintings:   La Bohémienne by Frans Hals.  Now, here is the point.  Had my uncle been with me, he would have had to look at the canvas one tiny piece at a time, and struggle to integrate into a complete image what I could see immediately and grasp as a whole.  I do not think that I was doing the same thing he would have been doing, only faster.  To use a term that came into fashion with a certain school of Psychology, I grasped the entire image in a gestalt [from the German for "shape" or "form."]

Something like this, I believe, is the way von Neumann grasped formal mathematical structures.  Whereas I am compelled, when I am attempting to master a mathematical theorem, to go through the proof step by step [like my uncle], carrying along what I have learned from the previous steps until I can assemble the entire idea of the proof in my mind, von Neumann and other great mathematicians grasp the central idea of the theorem in a gestalt, immediately.  It may then take them a long time to spell out their intuition in a series of correct steps leading from premises to conclusion, but they can see the theorem in the same way I can see a painting. 

Well, back to page 138.

THE REPUBLICAN WAR ON WOMEN

I would like to spend a little time talking about the extraordinary and troubling Republican attacks on women's health and reproductive rights.  These attacks are, if anything, more deeply disturbing in their manifestations at the state legislative level than at the federal level.  I will leave it to others to address the legal and legislative dimensions of this phenomenon.  [My son, Tobias, has been doing a fair amount of press, radio, and TV on this issue, and he is far, far better equipped than I to address the legal aspects.]

The politically suicidal nature of these attacks is obvious to even the most casual observer of the political scene.  The Republicans wrote off the Black vote two generations ago when they adopted what came to be called the "Southern strategy," although it was somewhat more accurately characterizable as a Southern and Southwestern strategy.  Despite George W. Bush's efforts to reach out to the Hispanic-American community, the Republicans decided to write off that large and growing segment of the voting population with their hysterical and obsessive focus on illegal immigration from Latin America and their rejection of even so limited a legislative measure as the Dream Act.  They have done little or nothing to counteract Obama's success in appealing to young voters.  And now, bizarrely and unaccountably, they have decided to alienate the largest single block of voters in the entire electorate -- women.  I think it is reasonable to ask what on earth is going on.

What strikes me most forcefully about the metastasizing attacks on women's health and reproductive rights by male Republican legislators is the sheer mean-spirited hostility, not to say hatred, that it reveals.  Not only do these male legislators want to deny women health insurance coverage for protections and procedures previously widely accepted as a customary component of health insurance.  They want to shame women who seek such insurance protection, to humiliate them, literally to rub their faces in it by requiring that women undergo unnecessary medical procedures and then be forced to watch the results.  One recent bill [in Arizona, I believe], requires women requesting insurance coverage for birth control medications to present medical evidence that they are not using these medications for birth control!

Now, the men proposing these laws, and in many cases enacting them, are for the most part married.  They have wives, who are using birth control medications.  They have daughters who are using birth control medications.  They have sons whose wives and partners are using birth control medications.  And yet, like Rush Limbaugh, who once again performs the indispensable function of saying out loud what these men are thinking, they clearly consider women who seek insurance coverage for birth control medications to be sluts and whores.  That is their own wives and daughters whom they are describing in that manner. 

It is possible, I think, to figure out what is going on, but only if we look beneath the surface, and learn a lesson or two from Sigmund Freud.  [Those who are unfamiliar with his work may wish to consult my Tutorial on The Thought of Sigmund Freud, accessible at box.net by clicking on the link at the top of this blog.]   A great many people [but here we are focusing on men] have deeply ambivalent feelings about all matters sexual.  They are powerfully drawn to sexual objects or potential partners, but feel deeply guilty about this attraction.  Many men are able to achieve a satisfying orgasm only with a woman whom they deem vile, or low, or unworthy -- a slut, a whore.  These men are often simultaneously attracted to and repelled by women who express sexual desire themselves.  In extreme cases, the feelings of guilt may be so crippling that they can only take pleasure in sex that is combined with punishment [the acting out of so-called bondage fantasies.]

For a very long time, the principal form of birth control was the condom, which is purchased by, brought to the sex act by, and worn by the man, who thus maintains control over the possibility of pregnancy and is able to perpetuate the fiction that the woman is a passive partner in the sex act.  But with the advent of the pill, women were finally able to take total control of their own sexuality.  By choosing to "go on the pill," a woman could decide for herself that she was ready for sex, and thus could determine, without the cooperation of the man, whether she would risk pregnancy.

This achievement by women of freedom and power terrifies some men.  It deprives them of control, it confronts them with the fact of open and acknowledged female sexuality, and it triggers in them fears and fantasies rooted in their own ambivalences and guilt about sexuality.  The emergence into the sunlight of female pornography has the same effect.  The very same men who consider women sluts and whores for wanting to purchase birth control medications themselves not only frequent prostitutes but also access readily available pornography on-line.  But they are horrified by the mere thought that there might be pornography deliberately aimed at women.

Now, all of this sounds pretty heavy and theoretical as an explanation for the fact that some idiotic politicians have chosen to introduced some punitive and destructive measures in their state legislatures.  But I really think one needs to learn something here from Freud [or from whatever other theorist of the human condition one finds insightful and helpful].  When someone does something manifestly self-defeating or self-destructive [like alienating the people whose votes one needs to get re-elected], and when this is done with an expression of feeling that seems inappropriate or out of proportion to the subject ostensibly under consideration, then an explanation is called for that goes beyond the explicit purposes that the person is overtly professing.

There is one more aspect of this curious and distressing phenomenon that ought to be mentioned.  Many, many people have thoughts and attitudes that they feel compelled by social pressure to keep to themselves.  The most obvious example is racist sentiments, which it was, not too long ago, perfectly acceptable to voice, but which these days have become quite unacceptable.  The sexual feelings and conflicts I have been discussing come under the same heading.  Now, it is psychologically difficult, indeed painful, to repress such thoughts and feelings, to maintain a public face that is so at odds with one's inner feelings.  This is by no means a psychologically cost free effort.  Sometimes, some utter reprobate just comes out and says what others are repressing.  This is met with whoops of laughter, with applause, with manifest relief that what has been bottled up has been given voice.  Suddenly, those repressed thoughts and feelings are given legitimacy, are admitted into the public space, and now there is an outpouring of very strong, hostile, angry expressions of a sort that one has not seen for a very long time.  Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum have performed this service for all the men with deeply conflicted hang-ups about sex who feel assaulted and abused by Women's Liberation and long to find a socially acceptable use for the words "slut" and "whore."

By the bye, you will notice that Santorum has moved on to a very high-profile attack on pornography.  Will it win him votes?  My guess is that deep down, he does not really care.  It must feel so good to him just to say the words.

THE CAMPAIGN BEGINS

I spent four hours this afternoon at the Timberlyne Shopping Center in Chapel Hill with a charming professor from NC Central University registering people for the election.  This was my first bit of on-the-street activism in the 2012 Obama campaign, and as always, I was impressed, not to say awed, by the power of the Obama ground game.  The Obama campagn is making a big play for North Carolina -- the Convention will be held in Charlotte.  Last time around, we won North Carolina by a hair -- 11,000 votes or so.  But northern medical and professional types have continued to flood into the triangle area [Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill] in the intervening four years, and North Carolina is definitely tilting Blue.  If Obama carries North Carolina and Virginia again, it will be nigh impossible for the Republican candidate to assemble 270 electoral votes.

We are seven months out from the election, and already the Obama campaign has paid staff on the ground here, rounding up volunteers like me, launching a systematic registration campaign, and preparing for a big push this summer and next fall.  I have never seen anything like this level and rationality of organization in a political campaign.

The effort is of course, from one point of view, hopelessly inefficient and a squandering of people's time and energies.  In four hours, the two of us, both accomplished professionals, signed up only eight new voters.  But this is time and energy that has no other political use, so it makes sense to squander it.

I am not, as they say in the business world, a people person, so in the future, I will probably volunteer to do data entry [there are a thousand jobs that need doing, so everyone's talents and procilvities can find some use in the campaign.]  I have a score of reservations and disappointments anent Obama's first term, but this is the real world, not the fantasy world of political ideologists, and the threats posed by a Republican victory are not to be borne.

I shall report from the front lines as time goes on.

ANOTHER CORRECTION

Andrew Hookum writes to point out that the book I am reading is called Turing's Cathedral, not Turing's Castle.  Quite right.  Perhaps dementia is setting in faster than I thought.

URGENT CORRECTION

How extraordinary the internet is!  I just had an email from Norman Geras, who somehow was made aware of my recommendation of his blog, in connection with a comment on this blog.  He wrote to assure me that he had never expressed a desire to have dinner with Henry Kissinger.  He seemed as appalled by the idea as I was.  I am happy to correct the record.  Falsely being accused of expressing a desire to dine with Kissinger is probably, in some jurisdictions, an actionable offense. 

EMPTY CALORIES

A long, long time ago [possibly sixty-five years ago, when I was a regular reader of two pocket-sized pulp science fiction magazines, Astounding Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction], I read a curious short story about a restaurant that served delicious but totally imaginary dishes to its patrons.  Since there was a significant danger that the customers might, upon leaving the restaurant, discover that they were still hungry, the proprietor had the waiters bring extremely tempting and quite real rolls and butter to the tables before the dishes ordered by the patrons were served.  The patrons would load up on the rolls, which were fortified with a variety of dietary supplements, and would never notice that the rest of their meal was an illusion.  [I cannot for the life of me recall the point of the story, or its denouement.]

I was reminded of the story yesterday evening as I launched into a seven hundred page Tom Clancy thriller called Against All Enemies that I had brought home from the library.  Tom Clancy novels are to reading what empty calories are to eating:  they produce the momentary impression that one has consumed a book, but turn out to have no intellectual or emotional nutriment whatsoever [nor any redeeming social value, but that is a matter for the Supreme Court to decide.]  After I had made my way 60 pages into the book, it dawned on me that I had already read it!  Now, I ask you, how is it possible, short of a dementia that I do not believe has yet afflicted me, to forget that one has read a seven hundred page book?  A book, what is more, that was published only last year.  I mean, could you just forget that you had read Crime and Punishment or Moby Dick?

When I checked the book out, the librarian, obviously concerned about an old guy taking out such a long book, warned me that the blue tape on the spine meant no renewals and no late returns.  I suspect I will get an odd look when I bring it back today.

That leaves me with Turing's Castle, to which I shall return.

DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION

[The title is of course a shameless steal from Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, a.k.a. Tom and Ray Magliazzi on PBS.]

I mentioned yesterday that I am reading a curious book called Turing's Castle by George Dyson, the son of the great Freeman Dyson.  The book is ostensibly about the invention of the digital computer, and I guess sooner or later it will get around to talking about that, but Dyson seems incapable of resisting even the slightest temptation to digress.  An early part of his story -- all of which is quite fascinating, by the way -- deals with the establishment of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton.  The Institute was built on land that originally was the Olden Farm.  Now, that is an interesting fact that in a normal book would be good for a paragraph.  Dyson, on the other hand, takes us all the way back to the Revolutionary War and traces the ownership and fate of the land across three centuries.  Why?  So far as I can  make out, for no better reason than that he collected a mass of research notes along the way to writing the book, and cannot leave anything out. 

There are payoffs to this odd style of narration, however.  Chapter Four is devoted to the family background, childhood, development, and character traits one of the authentically great minds of the twentieth or any other century, John von Neumann [I shall leave to one side the rather mysterious and complex relationship between this Americanization of his name and the original Hungarian, also gone into at great length by Dyson.]   Now, I have always had secret fantasies about having a mind like von Neumann's.  Well, maybe not so secret.  I seem to recall that at some point in my autobiography, I confessed that there are two abilities whose lack I really regret -- a facility with the learning of languages and the ability to grasp deep formal mathematical structures immediately and intuitively.  [The ability to play the violin or viola like Pinchas Zuckerman is a different thing, involving as it does uncounted hours of hard practice that I was never willing to put in.]  von Neumann possessed that capacity to such a degree that even world-famous mathematicians and physicists stood in awe of him.  For those of you who are unfamilair with von Neumann, perhaps it will suffice to say that in the course of his astonishing career, he made brief forays into Logic, Quantum Mechanics, and Economics, in each of which he proved extremely important results.  He was also, of course, the creator of Game Theory, and -- this is why he appears in this book -- the seminal mind behind the creation of the digital computer.

OK, what does this have to do with me?  Well, in Chapter Four, Dyson assembles quotations from many of the people who knew von Neumann and worked with him, in which we get a picture of how his mind worked.  AND IT TURNS OUT THAT HIS MIND WORKED THE WAY MINE DOES.

Now, that is the intellectual equivalent of the old joke about the flea crawling up the elephant's hind leg and yelling "Rape!"  von Neumann's mind worked like mine?  Yeah right.  And I look like Brad Pitt, except for the face and the body.  Let me try to explain.  When von Neumann encountered a problem, he would puzzle over it until he had disassembled it into its fundamental elements, and then he would reassemble them into a story that, by its pelliucid clarity, dissolved the problem as though it had never been there.  He worked in his head, as it were, and as a consequence wrote with blinding speed.  What others had to master by a slow and linear process, step by step, he grasped in a single intellectual intuition, as though he were simply looking at a painting rather than assembling it in his mind pixil by pixil.

Now, in a debased, trivial, second-rate fashion, that is the way my mind works.,  I experience deep intellectual problems as stories, which I tell to myself over and over until I can grasp the narrative line as firmly as I can grasp the narrative line of Jack and the Beanstalk.  That is how I managed to penetrate the inner mysteries of the Critique of Pure Reason, of Das Kapital, of A Treatise of Human Nature.  And it is why I write so fast, without revisions, once I start telling the story on paper.  If it were not for the people like John von Neumann, I might think I was one helluva fellow.  It is, I suppose, what it was like to be Antonio Salieri.  Salieri was, after all, a very successful musician, as the world measures these things, court composer to the Hapsburg Emperor and all.  He just had the great misfortune to live at the same time as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was to music what von Neumann was to mathematics.

Well, this blog post is a more than ordinarily embarrassing self-revelation, so I think I will just bring it to a close and go back to reading Dyson's book.