/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11566768]

>One of the world's brightest minds
>Converted to catholicism on his deathbed
What is the meaning of this?

[Anonymous No.11566779]

Pascal's wager

[Anonymous No.11566782]

>>11566768
>yeah, I’m a Christian, you got a problem with that? I used to be a sinner like you but 2 years ago I found GOD. In my teens I would laugh at creationists; I would always tell my grandma that I didn’t want to go to mass; I was agnostic but not like r/Atheism. But when I GREW UP and became a man, I realised I needed to put childish things away (1 Corinthians 13:11). Why is that? Because I realized that we need Christianity to SAVE THE WEST. After I voted Trump in the 2016 election I decided to go to church again. I knew that I would find a QT pure Christian GF who I could lose my virginity to (I haven’t lost it yet because I’m saving myself for marriage, like God intended). I haven’t found her yet, but like Job I will pray and have faith in God. Then I saw Jordan Peterson talking about Christianity and I was hooked! (I don’t like him anymore though, he’s a fake Christian). I watched all his videos on the bible and realised how God reveals himself in many ways. I was on /pol/ (came from r/The_Donald during the election but I hate redditors now) Christian General and I saw /lit/ chart which had The Bible and I KNEW I found my people. Every day I see THE WEST falling because we gave up our FAITH. Well, the new Christian intellectuals are coming; We are the sons of the Crusaders and we shall not recoil before the sons of Voltaire! (Candide was shit, so is Nietzsche (haven’t read either of them)). /lit/ introduced me to Kierkegaard and I became a KNIGHT OF FAITH, so now I know that I just gotta believe and that’s TRUE bravery. I read DANTE and DOSTOEVSKY and I saw the beauty of God and true art. I’m a proud Catholic (Protestants are heretics) but I hate Pope Francis, he’s a heretic and isn’t MY Pope. /lit/ is a Christian board, and I know that if I just keep recommending the Bible, telling people to go to church, and making threads about how great God is, I will finally be able to sincerely believe in God and distract myself from the gnawing feeling that I’m a fraud. Faith ain’t easy.

[Anonymous No.11566783]

>>11566768
>In 1955, von Neumann was diagnosed with what was either bone or pancreatic cancer. He was not able to accept the proximity of his own demise, and the shadow of impending death instilled great fear in him. He invited a Roman Catholic priest, Father Anselm Strittmatter, O.S.B., to visit him for consultation.
Sounds like he was too busy doing math to prepare for death. maybe if he read more philosophy he wouldn't have been so afraid

[Anonymous No.11566887]

>>11566768
Fear makes us stupid.

[Anonymous No.11566890]

>Is a genius
>Makes a smart move
What you'd expect?

[Anonymous No.11566891]

>>11566783
he was a polymath, he btfo a byzantine scholar with his knowledge of byzantine history and culture

[Anonymous No.11567723]

>>11566768
>One of the world's brightest minds
>extremely german name
>turns out to be one of (((them)))
why the fuck does this happen so much fuck off

[Anonymous No.11567742]

>>11566891
He sucked at ancient geometry. He says in Theory of Games that there is no unit of distance in Euclidean geometry, which is wrong

[Anonymous No.11567814]

>>11566782
>I post it everywhere people will surely become atheists again.

[Anonymous No.11567833]

He was just afraid of death.

[Anonymous No.11567840]

>>11567742
Not in modern sense in the ancient synthetic geometry, hence all the fuss about proportions and commensurability.

[Anonymous No.11567897]

>>11567840
No he dealt with Euclidean spaces all the time. Have you even read anything he wrote?

[Anonymous No.11567945]

>smartest man who ever lived
>built device for express purpose of turning all leftists into radioactive ash

[Anonymous No.11568020]

>>11566782
based

[Anonymous No.11568028]

>>11566782
Based and redpilled.

[Anonymous No.11568037]

>>11567723
what if he just larped as them to advance his academic career and then at the end came out as catholic

[Anonymous No.11568099]

>>11566779
Fpbp

[Anonymous No.11568163]

>>11567723
The truth: because intelligence is largely just cultivated through routine application of text material for a younger boy.

Regardless of whether or not Von Neumann understood how to divide 8 digit numbers at an early age, he also didn’t understand how indifference curves worked very well. Not if he thought there was a single number that could represent economic utility given any situation.

That’s my take

[Anonymous No.11568185]

People do strange things on their deathbeds. They're understandably not in their right mind. After all they're dying.
I'm sure some people carry out whole conversations with people who aren't there on their deathbeds, float through the cosmos, get whispered to by both angels and devils, figments and distortions. The brain releases all kinds of endorphins, self-made painkillers, just to get you out the door.
I'll probably have some kind of buddhist hallucination when Im dying because that has informed a lot of my thinking about the subject.The first near-death experience I had definitely did have Christian undertones however.

[Anonymous No.11568197]

>live life of concupiscence
>recant on deathbed
Who wouldn't take advantage of the loophole?

[Anonymous No.11568236]

>>11566768
he pussed out

[Anonymous No.11568266]

>>11567723
>(((them)))
In no way was he one of (((them)))
I also personally argue that he was THE brightest human in all of human history.

But he still afraid of death.

[Anonymous No.11568286]

>>11566768
>>One of the world's brightest minds

[Anonymous No.11568323]

>>11568163
how can it be possible that his savant-like memory and mental arithmetic are purely due to routine practice? surely it wouldn't be so extremely rare if that were the case. especially not both. and then combined with high ability to understand many different fields quickly. I think he can be forgiven for misunderstanding a few things given all the other stuff he contributed to math, physics, compsci, manhattan, etc.

[Anonymous No.11568439]

>>11568323
He wasn’t that smart. Like I said, I think he misunderstood indifference curves

[Anonymous No.11568453]

>>11568439
>He wasn’t that smart. Like I said, I think he misunderstood indifference curves
von Neumann was a genius, a literal genius. This fucking board lol

[Anonymous No.11568462]

>>11568266
>In no way was he one of (((them)))
>Von Neumann was born Neumann János Lajos to a wealthy, acculturated and non-observant Jewish family (in Hungarian the family name comes first.

[Anonymous No.11568514]

>>11568453
Shut up pseudo, I could probably wipe the floor with you in whatever Von Neumann write about

>defending someone you’ve never read
Peak pseud

[Anonymous No.11568590]

>>11568462
Yet if you cared to actually learn about him you learn that he was clearly areligious and did not associate with any such (((group)))

[Anonymous No.11568622]

>>11568439
ok but I mainly mean the memory/arithmetic abilities, which are usually associated with genetic mental disorders, are likely also to be the result of something genetic (though without the usual negatives) rather than simply routine practice
and if it were likely one could achieve such mathematical capability as to get a phd at 20, wouldn't more people have done it? with a new, better axiomization of set theory as thesis too (at a time when z-f, hilbert, russell, godel, etc had also been working to come up with such improvements)

[Anonymous No.11568686]

>>11566890
This.
/thread

[Anonymous No.11568705]

>Von Neumann was on his deathbed when he entertained his brother by reciting by heart and word-for-word the first few lines of each page of Goethe's Faust.

Nice

[Anonymous No.11569066]

>>11568622

There’s a biography of him I have read where the author states that his memory was good, but not miraculous. For example, one of his friends said he knew every word of every book he had ever read, which was clearly an exaggeration.
Many of his friends enjoys circulating legends about him, while reality was a little less legendary.

The reality is that, when he wanted to memorize something, he had to sit down and do a conscious effort. When he was moving to the US he decided to better his English by reading Dickens A Tale of Two Cities. He decided to memorize the first pages by heart to amuse his friends, and worked his way into knowing how to recite them by heart.

As you can see he could memorize things well when he set his mind to it, but he wasn’t a machine-like savant with some different brain structure that allowed him to remember everything he have ever read (there are some cases like that, like Kim Peek, but this people have organically different brains: that gives them unexplainable capacities in some areas while at the same time damaging other important functions of a healthy central nervous system).

[Anonymous No.11569072]

>>11566768
i converted to catholicism today at age 21, which means i'm 100x smarter than him since i didn't have to wait till death

[Anonymous No.11569081]

>>11566779
Pascal was a mathematician and Catholic. Von Neumann knew what was up.

[Anonymous No.11569119]

>>11566768
When you're sick and dying your organs will work worse.
The brain is an organ.
Ergo...

[Anonymous No.11569128]

>>11569072
actually waiting till your deathbed to get baptized is smart cuz u have less time to sin, thats how early christians did it, but after the fall of rome life expectancy went so low people started baptizing babies cuz they might croak at any minute

[Anonymous No.11569178]

>>11569128
lolol wise, but you never know if you'll be baptized in time or even have a death bed (might just get in a car wreck and die instantly or some shit)

[Anonymous No.11569205]

Im slowly becomming a savant

[Anonymous No.11569445]

>>11566782

[Anonymous No.11569585]

>>11566890

[Anonymous No.11569737]

>>11566782

The sad thing is that this caricature is no caricature at all: there are several young people around the world who are exactly the person that this poster joked about.

[Anonymous No.11570967]

>>11566782
Fake alt right Christianity BTFO

[Anonymous No.11570999]

>>11568453
>taking 4chan seriously

FUCKING summer pseuds

[Anonymous No.11571004]

>>11568590
>it's an antisemite doesn't want to admit his hero is a jew episode

[Anonymous No.11571028]

>>11566768
>afraid of death
>convert last minute
There, he was a pussy.

[Anonymous No.11571056]

>>11566768

People weaken and are frail when they die.

(whoopie, moral victory Christianity! We caught one at his weakest!)

In contrast, I present one of my favorite episodes of death: Francis Bacon, the painter. Bacon was on vacation in Spain when he fell ill and ultimately died. He was among Catholic nuns who cared for him, away from those close to him, and they tried to trick him. Bacon stayed strong until the end, utterly unrepentant. Good man, Bacon.

I hope that I die as Bacon did. Not in such a dramatic fashion, but sincerely unrepentant. Because it's all a lie, and none of this matters. This is what Bacon understood, as I do.

No, he isn't in hell, nor will I be. Hell is boring. Bacon did hell better in his paintings.

[Anonymous No.11571258]

>>11569081
reading Pascal's Pensées, some of the most profound reading in all Christian theology.

"“Had I seen a miracle,” say men, “I should become converted.” How can they be sure they would do a thing of the nature of which they are ignorant? They imagine that this conversion consists in a worship of God which is like commerce, and in a communion, such as they picture to themselves. True religion consists in annihilating self before that Universal Being, whom we have so often provoked, and who can justly destroy us at any time; in recognising that we can do nothing without Him, and have deserved nothing from Him but His displeasure. It consists in knowing that there is an unconquerable opposition between us and God, and that without a mediator there can be no communion with Him."

[Anonymous No.11571271]

>>11569128
that's not...what? is this shit posting?

[Anonymous No.11571299]

>>11571056
ok, this post was epic.

[Anonymous No.11571326]

>>11567723
Because lots of jews lived in Germany and the most secular who also tend to be the smartest adopted German surnames, and since azkhenazi jews are way slated than white gentiles you get von neumnam.

That's it.

[Anonymous No.11571330]

>>11568323

it's genetics, don't listen to that idiot.

[Anonymous No.11571356]

>>11566768
It's almost like... being intelligent doesn't make you impervious to irrationality.
Hmmm, really makes me think?