The von Neumann machines are a process. It has many different organs. von Neumann worked on the brain in particular, that was a big bottleneck and still is, others eg Henry Ford specialized in an analog of the muscle. The Industrial revolution at one point specialized in textiles, one of the many many things performed by the fingers of the only real unique organ humans possess, the human hand. But it took a huge amount of fingers finging, like people would spend so so so much time weaving, slaving away at the loom, replacing that function with machines to give everyone good clothes (everybody has good clothes), was worth I think...two fingers per person. It was also a finger-intensive process, the machine could remove fingers, machines still do, that's why that one industrialist specialized in hiring child labor for the machines and visited orphanage after orphanage, saying hey children have small fingers that's perfect for these machines.
And that ties into why we have ten fingers, like we have thirty-two teeth at adulthood and need some removed, that is after losing the first round of teeth in childhood. There's replacements. Some monkeys used for experiments need to be kept in cages, watching cartoons (meant for human children, same ones, they don't make special cartoons for the monkeys), and the monkeys (I wish I remembered what species this was) stop and stare at the screen, paralized. Keeps them pretty happy while they're isolated from each other in cages. Normally they're not kept in cages, except for this experiment, you know why? This experiment required them having all ten fingers, like humans, but if left hanging around as a group they bite each others's fingers off like in the first three minutes. Just to figure out who gets to fuck, basic pecking order, right off the bat. Ten fingers is like ten shirts. In Utopia Thomas More...well one of his characters, he specifically wrote that book within a book to defray responsibility...said if you have ten shirts you are a clotheshorse. Too many clothes. Because they had such a huge cost. A cost of drudgery, then performed by the mechanical loom. That's one organ.
von Neumann machine. Organ by organ.
Like can you imagine a whale telling another whale e=mc^2? Who gives a shit! Want a Nobel Prize you blowhole? Gotta keep hunting squid every day, that's the bottom line, philosophy (don't know the whale word for this) is for when both us whales are full. The human hand is what gives that the power it has, humans are busting open a bottleneck of life with our hands. I'm typing this with all my fingers. I couldn't do this by voice. It would come out different, not as spinal. In fact my hands are writing faster than my inner monologue. They absolutely have a life of their own.
Yeah shipwrecks. For sure there were people crossing the Atlantic via shipwreck, they could flat-out never make it back. Even then people could be disbelieving and say, "eh old Mariner's tale.". Nobody buys those stories, nobody buys the stories about sea monsters (whales intelligently ramming ships crossing their territory), everybody thinks sailors are full of shit. That's what happened with the Vikings, who did cross the Atlantic, but couldn't exploit it nicely (from the explorer's point of view) like the Hispanics. It's also because Vikings crossed before the Black Death, so they weren't infected with smallpox. Bioweapon. Back to the shipwrecks: this fact, that you can't make it back, was critical to the Atlantic Slave Trade: Africans had no hope of returning to Africa, once an African sold an enemy off to the Europeans headed for America, he had no worries of seeing that enemy return to Africa. That was key. A Colonial historian told me this.