Game Theory: Victims and Accomplices  

He was enthusiastic about watching nuclear explosions and went to see a number of them.  He would eventually die of radiation caused cancer resulting from   this fascination. In may 1953 he made a list of organizations to which he was affiliated as a consultant, mostly these were government organization, but also on the list were Standard Oil, IBM, Rand and the CIA. He profited personally from some of these connections, and used science, as many of the genetics and computer researchers have done since, to enrich himself. He also, with Morgenstern, invented Game Theory, which is still used to play imaginary nuclear games and scenarios by the military. purporting to be a 'neutral" description of games and strategy, Heims points out that Game theory "portrays a world of people relentlessly and ruthlessly but with intelligence and calculation pursuing what each perceives to be his own interest. Other 'players' are seen as enemies, competitors or collaborators". [1]  This definition of  Game Theory, rather interestingly, fits nearly exactly with a clinical profile of a psychopathic or sociopathic personality, with the psychological profile of a cult leader, or with Machiavelli's The Prince.  Madeleine Tobias, quoted earlier, describes sociopaths as seeing others as "objects, targets or opportunities, not as people. They do not have friends they have victims and accomplices" The implications that a supposedly disinterested, mathematical theory could fit the profile of a sociopath brings the ideal of mathematical and scientific neutrality seriously into question,  and also implies what common sense might otherwise tell us,- that organizations, states and systems of knowledge/power have a psycho-social dimension that makes them dangerous,  and that levels of abstraction increase, or magnify the possibility of this danger . An individual, say Columbus, Himmler or Von Neumann is not very dangerous alone, and probably not dangerous at all, but the social dimension, and the system of knowledge that supports it, magnify the danger exponentially. 

            In von Neumann's case his Theory of Games, developed in 1928 and expanded with Oscar Morganstern in 1944 was not merely a theory of parlor games, but also an attempt to create a mathematical theory of economy and war. "Applied first to economics, game theory was eventually used by US government strategists as a foreign policy instrument and a technique for choosing parlor game strategies proved all too easily adaptable to choosing strategies for international thermonuclear war". [2] Von Neumann liked military history and was especially fond, according to Heims, of Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War. Neumann He particularly liked the passage that states, "the standard of justice depends upon the equality of power to compel and that, in fact, the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept" [3] The importance of this view to von Neumann's views on quantum mechanics and mathematics should not be underestimated. He saw mathematics as a Platonic system of "abstract essences", "independent of any special place or time".[4] The claim to universal truth implicity in this view is also a claim to universal power. Von Neumann's mathematics was a road to godlike power.

            Von Neumann's work in Quantum mechanics is too esoteric for my understanding, but the esoteric nature of Quantum Mechanics is part of its religious allure. There is one aspect of it that leads to some interesting questions. For von Neumann, the paradoxes of quantum mechanics seems to have led him to a confusion between his own mathematical abstractions and the natural world that these abstractions were supposed to describe. As Heims points out, von Neumann's belief in formal logic was analogous to a Christian's belief in "timeless myths " which "Christian theology [uses to explain] time and history". "Von Neumann's formal logics were his myths". The observation that some of the paradoxes of quantum mechanics and logic open up to or resemble religious 'truth' has often been made.  Replacing mathematical abstractions for religious abstractions, or vice versa is not surprising. But a healthy skepticism ought to be maintained about these claims. What is clear however, if one maintains this skepticism, is that questions about the role of the human mind in scientific descriptions of reality became central to science after the 1940's. Schrodinger's observation that the thinking ego of scientists appears nowhere in the scientific world picture because it is that picture, expresses the paradox very well. Science had become, to men like von Neumann the ultimate system of description that not only possessed what legitimate knowledge of nature mankind could possess, but also the description granted enormous power over what was described. Approximating total knowledge seemed to grant, to some of these men, like von Neumann and Oppenheimer, an emotional approximation of total power. The universe itself, through the glories of mathematical abstraction and technological power, seemed to be reflected in the glory of their minds. Just as Christian theology allowed Innocent III to see himself at the summit of all knowledge and power, and thus entitled to supereminent rights to empire and global control, so science and mathematics allowed von Neumann to see himself at the summit of knowledge/power which enabled him to participate in the creation of a corporate and Transnational empire that the US government and Big Business began extending around the globe after World War II.

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