Extending the Ego, through Technology, into the Universe

            This brings us, at last, to one of the pictures that governs this chapter. Oppenheimer, at the moment of the detonation of the first atomic weapon,  seems to have seen atomic weapons as extensions of himself. He was like a god. Von Neumann, like Oppenheimer,  seems to have seen not only computers, but also atomic weapons as extensions of himself, his intellect or his mind. Von Neumann wanted to reproduce the brain as a machine, and saw a description of the brain in  "formal -logical terms as an ultimate objective of science". [1] He also fantasized and produced some mathematical work on the possibility of self reproducing machines, which "is among von Neumann's most original work". He envisioned machines that could perpetuate themselves endlessly, perhaps giving von Neumann himself the kind of immortality that he sought. In his concern with self-creating machines and the power of nuclear weapons, von Neumann begins to see himself in godlike terms as if he were the Master of all alchemy or the father of godlike machines.[2] Steve Heims, his biographer, explains this: 

How, precisely, did von Neumann see his relation to technical devices? In his pre-war measurement theory he had viewed the instrument as an extension of the scientist and had emphasized the arbitrariness of the dividing line between the measuring instrument and the person because the instrument expands the observer's powers of perception. During and after the war, von Neumann regarded these as extensions, supplements to his mental powers. Thus, they too helped him overcome limitations. The continuity of this theme makes it possible to speculate that  he also regarded nuclear weapons as means of self-  aggrandizement; as extensions of himself.[3]

            This is a particularly glaring example that indicates that theory and practices are not separate things: that science and its applications are intrinsically related and that the impersonal theory of neutral scientific truth, on which von Neumann relied, is easily used to cloak the will to power through knowledge. Schrodinger said that the scientific world picture is the thinking ego of scientists and those who use science for their advantage. The implication of this insight is that science can no longer be seen as a theory of impersonal truth, but rather is a creation of men, who live their lives among other men, who desire goods, wealth, power or fame, justice or rights, and that all these pursuits become enshrined, subtlely or openly, in their science. Science has tended to become a religion which advances claims to a knowledge which no one may question, as if it were infallible. Von Neumann thought he was infallible, and wrote his mathematical treatises and advanced his advice to generals and Business men with the claim to be neutral. But he was not neutral, and in his mathematical proofs, his theories and his technical work, there is veiled a will to power and a system of explanations designed to promote himself. This can be said of other scientists as well.

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