The Maniac

What is the meaning of an idea?

There is the thing itself, born in the mind, an association that springs to life as the result of neurons firing, thoughts connected to other thoughts connected to prior knowledge connected to desire connected to the conscious and unconscious, a web of chemical reactions stitched together, constructing a piece of the self, the most intimate piece, which resides in the unknowable part of our identity, built upon language but also on sensory experience, the two things together, sometimes one used to describe the other, silently, in our minds as we name the things we see, as we connect them, as the alchemy of thinking creates a new, unique thought.

It is that, but it is also how we externalize it, how we describe it in the world and, once described, how it is taken up by other minds, perhaps made manifest in some form— an object, an action, a theory, words, language.

It is that, too, but also the result of that externalization in other minds as they collaborate with it, build upon the original, carry it forward, mutate it, replicate it, expand upon it or reduce it to nothing. It can lay dormant, only to be picked up later, it can be everything from an instantly forgotten notion, a mere whim, to the framework of knowledge itself— science, from a single connection between two thoughts to an incalculable network of ideas that generate something powerful and new, a world-shifting ideal, a process for thinking, for quantifying understanding, for building systems of thought that can transform human experience and, thus, history.

Benjamín Labatut's The MANIAC is a book that explores the tangible, knowable history of the development of modern computational systems and the human beings that helped create them, a stunning piece of writing that is both a historical recounting of how science found itself at the center of the arms race for nuclear supremacy and thus, the story of how an idea was realized in our world, inspiring an entirely new form of computational power.

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https://backrowmanifesto.substack.com/p/notebook-the-maniac-by-benjamin-labatut