For progress there is no cure. - John von Neumann

If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o' clock, I say why not one o' clock?

In the deceptively modest volume you are now holding, von Neumann articulates his model of computation and goes on to define the essential equivalence of the human brain and a computer. He acknowledges the apparently deep structural differences, but by applying Turing’s principle of the equivalence of all computation, von Neumann envisions a strategy to understand the brain’s methods as computation, to re-create those methods, and ultimately to expand its powers.

"The general opinion in theoretical physics had accepted the idea that the principle of continuity ("natura non facit saltus"), prevailing in the microsoptic world, is merely simulated by an averaging process in a world which in truth is discontinuous by its very nature. This simulation is such that a man generally percieves the sum of many billions of elementary processes simultaneously, so that the leveling law of large numbers completely obscures the real nature of the individual processes."