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" Stan Ulam visited whenever he could. “He never complained about pain, but the change in his attitude, his utterances, his relations with Klári, in fact his whole mood at the end of his life were heartbreaking,” he remembers. “At one point he became a strict Catholic. A Benedictine monk visited and talked to him. Later he asked for a Jesuit. It was obvious that there was a great gap between what he would discuss verbally and logically with others, and what his inner thoughts and worries about himself were.” Von Neumann’s scientific curiosity and his memory were the last things he let go. “A few days before he died,” adds Ulam, “I was reading to him in Greek from his worn copy of Thucydides a story he liked especially about the Athenians’ attack on Melos, and also the speech of Pericles. He remembered enough to correct an occasional mistake or mispronunciation on my part.”26 "
― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe
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" The emergence of life and intelligence from less-alive and less-intelligent components has happened at least once. Emergent behavior is that which cannot be predicted through analysis at any level simpler than that of the system as a whole. Explanations of emergence, like simplifications of complexity, are inherently illusory and can only be achieved by sleight of hand. This does not mean that emergence is not real. Emergent behavior, by definition, is what’s left after everything else has been explained. “Emergence offers a way to believe in physical causality while simultaneously maintaining the impossibility of a reductionist explanation of thought,” wrote W. Daniel Hillis, a computer architect who believes that architecture and programming can only go so far, after which intelligence has to be allowed to evolve on its own. “For those who fear mechanistic explanations of the human mind, our ignorance of how local interactions produce emergent behavior offers a reassuring fog in which to hide the soul.”33 Although individual computers and individual computer programs are developing the elements of artificial intelligence, it is in the larger networks (or the network at large) that we are developing a more likely medium for the emergence of the Leviathan of artificial mind. "
― George Dyson , Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence