Finding Peter Putnam | Hacker News Reader

Finding Peter Putnam

nautil.us

96 pointsdnetesn68 comments

"Every game needs a goal. In a Turing machine, goals are imposed from the outside. For true induction, the process itself should create its own goals. And there was a key constraint: Putnam realized that the dynamics he had in mind would only work mathematically if the system had just one goal governing all its behavior.

That’s when it hit him: The goal is to repeat. Repetition isn’t a goal that has to be programmed in from the outside; it’s baked into the very nature of things—to exist from one moment to the next is to repeat your existence. “This goal function,” Putnam wrote, “appears pre-encoded in the nature of being itself.”

So, here’s the game. The system starts out in a random mix of “on” and “off” states. Its goal is to repeat that state—to stay the same. But in each turn, a perturbation from the environment moves through the system, flipping states, and the system has to emit the right sequence of moves (by forming the right self-reinforcing loops) to alter the environment in such a way that it will perturb the system back to its original state."

I'm a big fan of this line of thinking. I've been arguing for years that RL should be based in homeostasis and this seems right along those lines. I wish I could have talked with him!

Being machines

The goal is to avoid entropy?

A captivating read, bringing life to a very interesting character. Thank you for posting this.

I do wonder about Putnam's research though. Has it been looked into by experts in the field more recently? The article doesn't really give an answer to this.

I agree, it was a very interesting read, though not very information dense. The article vaguely gestures at something that approaches what we now know as “reinforcement learning”, but it seems like Putnams theories were developed entirely in parallel, and those two worlds never intersecting?

I second this! What a fascinating read!

Regarding the point about current research, I found in the article:

"Gary Aston-Jones, head of the Brain Health Institute at Rutgers University, told me he was inspired by Putnam to go into neuroscience after Clarke gave him one of Putnam’s papers.

“Putnam’s nervous system model presaged by decades stuff that’s very cutting edge in neuroscience,” Aston-Jones said, and yet, “in the field of neuroscience, I don’t know anybody that’s ever heard of him.”"

After this article last week started to read his work (some available here https://www.peterputnam.org/) What a life, what a character.

That was a fascinating article. I have no doubt that Putnam's work is far beyond me -- considering that it is beyond leading academics in the field -- but I appreciate the description of a man who tried his best to find the right path for himself, even if it was at odds with what the world expected of him.

If your fishing net is constructed just right--so as to pick out the many interesting gems in this article, you will be glad to know Gefter has also published a book that revolves around John Wheeler.

If Putnam was really a genius I think he would have been able to communicate precisely some of this insight to mere mortals. It seems that he taught the same course during 10 years and that seems time enough to mature a good introduction to his ideas. Being ineffable don't entitle you to being a genius.

What seems clear is that he was in the right moment and with the right people to produce a great theory of the mind, he was thinking about defining the mind as a creator of heuristic for generating inductive rules, that is a very interesting idea, also that seems related to cellular automata and homeostasis, fixed point theory, error recovery and many other ideas that we, with our ability to look back in time, can see are located in their neighborhood. Recently we are using LLMs to produce heuristic or rules to generate python programs to explore proofs or new models, so the gems is still alive.

The field he was interested in it is full of little diamonds waiting for someone to find them, but perhaps he just put his foot in the door without entering (or creating) the field he was trying to envision. It could be that his paper could reveal some intuition that could guide us in a new search for meaning but from this post there is no any hint about that beyond such a desire.

https://www.peterputnam.org

Wow, I always thought Hilary was the only Putnam to come up with a computational theory of mind.

What a beautiful article about a fascinating man -- I'd be glad to read a full biography.

When first I saw the title I was thinking "how can he be forgotten when I've heard of the Putnam prize", but it's a totally different Putnam.

And according to my friendly neighbourhood LLM, they're not immediately related.

Beautifully written article about an interesting man. Hats off to Amanda (article author) for her determination!

But this story is also a great reminder on the importance of readability. I can't name Putnam a genius if his works were so incomprehensible, that even best of the best had trouble deciphering them. Just like you wouldn't call programmer a genius if he wrote his best work in brainfuck.

I guess he never intended his works to be read. So I won't.

I like how his theory* of the mind basically states that humans intrinsically are OK and everything is fine.

---

* if it's simplification in the article is correct and I understand that simplification correctly

> The neighborhood was quiet. There was a chill in the air. The scent of Spanish moss hung from the cypress trees. Plumes of white smoke rose from the burning cane fields and stretched across the skies of Terrebonne Parish. The man swung a long leg over a bicycle frame and pedaled off down the street.

I stopped halfway through this paragraph and just googled Peter Putnam.

If I want an article to take hours to get to the point I'll go read a recipe blog.

Thanks.

> If I want an article to take hours to get to the point I'll go read a recipe blog.

I don't appreciate all the extra text in recipe blogs either.

IMHO, narrative prose in an article about someone's life is MUCH more appropriate than its use in a recipe.

Good god, the perpetual disdain of default HN for narrative exposition is so deep-rooted.

Y'all know humans are kinda "made of" stories, right? Stories are the unit layer that we add on top of biological structure. It's not "data"

Imho it is essentially self-loathing of the human condition to valorise raw data and detest linear narrative as much as this crowd seems to do

EDIT: Narrative is the wings, without which data cannot travel through enough of the bell curve of minds. Being anti-story is being anti-democratic is toward authoritarianism. </ hot-take>

I hate this (extremely popular) take.

Narrative is suasion, not substance.

The storytellers know of no other way to tell the audience what is important, so the medium is the message.

EDIT: and…the trope anticlimactic downvotes seal the drama

You loathing others’ preferences /= them self-loathing. Presumptuous and insulting.

The only truly scarce thing for living creatures is time. The HN crowd expects respect of that so a disclaimer would help filter people with the wrong expectations.

I do agree, both approaches are valid to seek. Setting expectations with disclaimers would be helpful so people can enter willingly instead of perpetually critiquing via comment. I don't like a culture of bashing/minimising one approach, which I admittedly have just participated in.

But in my defence, I'm in a "punching up" mode here, in the minority sense. I'd probably argue for valorising data more in an arts space.

But something about the current tech world-builders not having respect for narrative makes me frustrated and afraid. How can we ever build things that account for parts of minds and life that we don't respect. (I sense a lack of respect for why and how narrative has been the vehicle of so much human progress and growth)

Sure, but “punching up” is also a classic copyrighting term.

Please keep in mind that the people who are anti-story are the same folks who view human interaction as a “problem to be solved”. They’re the outliers in society who make the rest of our lives easier. But they have gained way too much power in this world and are intent on dooming us all to their cold, dark, inhuman world.

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How was the comment ableist?

Oblique references to autism and autistic individuals. Perhaps my sensitivity to such things is a little too high.

A million years ago around a campfire, I watched grandpa try to tell my child his favorite story. It wasn't going smoothly as he would like. I lovingly watched him persist. At some point he sighed and met my sympathetic gaze. It was time to kick embers and turn in.

Maybe it’s the pacing of the article that’s off. Feels like it’s wasting one’s time with self-indulgent prose.

The short story in your comment, OTOH, is very much better. I can see the scene, my mind has filled in some details, and it took only a couple seconds to read.

I think pacing is more aptly the issue than narrative. Perhaps even more specifically, the load-bearing first couple sentences dive right into establishing a complex setting before any other context is established. Even as I may enjoy narrative, I rarely enjoy effortful fumbling around in the dark unless it's with Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov.

Can you please not cross into personal attack or general nastiness, even when an article is bad or you feel it is? We're trying for something else on this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

So if I dressed my insults up in purple prose like the comment I was responding to, or the parent of that comment, did -- would that be "the kind of discussion we try to foster here on HN"?

That doesn't sound like a good-faith question to me.

We've asked you many times to stop breaking the site guidelines. If you keep doing it, we are going to ban you. This is getting absurd:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43875721 (May 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35535148 (April 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30275888 (Feb 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29212633 (Nov 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26418766 (March 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25563542 (Dec 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22050749 (Jan 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356769 (July 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20350618 (July 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20054704 (May 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797087 (Dec 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18114166 (Oct 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18034335 (Sept 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17517586 (July 2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577510 (June 2017)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13970380 (March 2017)

I am not anti story. I am in fact, a fiction writer. I live for stories. But there's a time and a place. And I think pigeonholing everyone who opines "tldr" as some sort of robotic fascist who wants all human discourse in binary or whatever is reductionist and moronic. I'm not burning books, I just thought an article should get to the bloody point

> Please keep in mind that the people who are anti-story are the same folks who view human interaction as a “problem to be solved”.

Yes. But your next statement is nonsense.

> They’re the outliers in society who make the rest of our lives easier.

Nothing about Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg made our lives easier. All they've done is made the social contract worse, making our lives harder, not easier. They've given lucrative jobs to a few, but all their market offerings gave the world is distraction and misery, in the case of Facebook, and flashy status symbols to chase, in the case of Tesla. They crowded out the market for competitors, so people can't have truly useful solutions to the problems Zuck and Musk claimed to solve.

Ask yourself why Chinese electric cars would be banned from the US market and you're getting there. Musk bought a social network with the explicit aim of making it worse, and more than succeeded.

You'll never cut through this attitude. It is, as you say, perpetual. HN is their safe space, hence the strong reaction you're receiving. You're going to have to learn how to operate within the mindset if you want pleasant interactions here. Learn to appreciate the dull rationalistic mental sludge.

Putnam himself would feel perfectly comfortable here.

The guy who was disciplined for reading poetry on duty during WWII, who threw away his commissioned abstract sculpture would feel perfectly comfortable on a forum clearly hostile to anything that isn't a hard fact or a short thinkpiece about engineering management or an explanation of rust's reference counter?

I like to think that the things that drove him away from society and caused him to seclude himself from it are the very things this community values and seeks to protect.

The irony is that you noped out of an article about someone whose life's worth of thought led him to believe that you can't understand how someone is right without understanding their circumstances.

Your post is a sort of sad admission that your attitude will prevent you from seeing the beauty in everyone.

You do you though. I am sure there is a reason you are this way ;)

I will do me but I'm future I won't tell anyone, and I think that's better for all of us

It was approaching 9 AM one early summer morning, uncharacteristically cool. The city was quiet as drops of dew hang heavily from the blades of grass and the flower petals, still fresh in their memory of the visitations of bees from the day before. The only sound was the sound of typing, as a comment was posted to HN expressing support for the GP. There's a time and place for literary exposition. Maybe this magazine is the right place and most of their audience appreciates it, but it's also OK to feel put off by it when you're curious and hoping to learn something.

Haha ok this was good.

It's messy. Anyone who claims one way (myself included) is probably Very Wrong On The Internet

That is indeed a take so spicy as to be shartworthy. Disliking this glurgy, fluff-laden narrative article style does not make one a soulless cryptofascist robot. One could imagine a different format for the article that front-loads the interesting bits and then delves into background detail, rather than forcing the reader to wade through pages of lit-fic-wannabe padding to get to the money shot. Articles used to be written this way all the time, but that was before writers and magazines were paid by the ad view.

Take out the flying duck “sh***rthy” and you will have made an excellent series of points.

I'm not a very critical reader*. When I read something, I don't have conversations with myself about "this could be better if..." or "the writer shouldn't have..." Instead, I accept what has been proffered and at the end decide if it had value for me.

* unless I make a conscious effort to, like when I'm asked to review someone's work

Narrative is great but not everything needs a narrative. And I'll admit an article about someone who tried to reconcile the rational brain with the emotional mind is maybe such a place, but I just wasn't in the mood. Maybe I should have kept my experience to myself

But the narrative has to be captivating.

Didn’t seem to captivate OP.

Can you please make your substantive points without putting down the rest of the community? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

It's much, much (did I say much?) too easy to turn a handful of unpleasant datapoints into an entire theory-of-the-community—almost always one that presents it as somehow depraved or wretched. It's understandable, but it makes for tedious conversation. That's why that guideline is in there.

Yes, the quoted section is rather overwrought, but I didn't know it was there. Why? I skimmed right over it. Your ability to take in information would be greatly improved if you can train your brain to be non-reactive to such things.

I dunno, just because I know to scroll down on recipe.com doesn't mean it's not irritating each time. It's like web advertising. I can look past it most of the time but I still gravitate to sites that use less or none. I think its a valid response to a bad writing pattern.

Well, parent missed out on a lot of context that just reading Wikipedia doesn't contain.

If you stopped halfway through this paragraph, how did you know what it said?

I stopped halfway, googled the guy, then came back and copied the first paragraph. It's not some great conspiracy

OK I figured that's what happened, I mean, interesting time saving strategy..

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Good point, it wasn't very helpful

Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong another user is or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yet you took the time to then go to this site, open a comment box and clog up a potentially informative thread with yet another bit of "interaction optimization" bullshit over a very human, often atmospheric desire to creatively express words.

Wouldn't it have been easier to just keep reading a bit longer?

Interestingly he doesn’t seems to have a wiki article, the only Peter Putman there is a bodybuilder

I did the same thing except I pasted the link into GPT and had it summarize.

Personally unless I'm reading fiction I don't care for backstory and setting.

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry, this was no Vivian Maier.

Not even close.

Your comment could have been so much better. I'd not heard of Vivian Maier but her photography sounds fascinating. I don't know why you think it's related to a philosopher because you didn't say.

You can improve your comment with just a little more effort.

I'm guessing the association is that these are two figures who weren't famous in their lifetimes and became known later.

You're right that putting down one figure is not a good way to introduce another. It would be better to submit the most interesting online article about Vivian Maier, so we could have a thread about her in her own right.

Edit: turns out we've had quite a few! though not very large ones:

What Vivian Maier saw in color (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43239046 - March 2025 (11 comments)

Vivian Maier, One of the Best Street Photographers of the 20th Century - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40930530 - July 2024 (1 comment)

What Vivian Maier Saw in Color (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19498483 - March 2019 (17 comments)

Vivian Maier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19358138 - March 2019 (5 comments)

Camera Obscura: A biography of street photographer Vivian Maier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15214955 - Sept 2017 (5 comments)

Digging Deeper into Vivian Maier's Past - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10886162 - Jan 2016 (1 comment)

Man Buys 10k Undeveloped Negatives, Discovers Important Street Photographers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9750598 - June 2015 (1 comment)

Misplaced: Ethics and the Photographs of Vivian Maier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9084386 - Feb 2015 (1 comment)

Vivian Maier's undeveloped film on hold amid legal fight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8906719 - Jan 2015 (8 comments)

Vivian Maier: Amazing unknown street photographer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2256750 - Feb 2011 (4 comments)

Vivian Maier: A life's work seen for first time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2127744 - Jan 2011 (51 comments)

> It’s easy to say why someone is wrong, Putnam said. The hard part is figuring out why they’re right. And everyone is right. Everyone has some central insight, hard won by the consistency-making mechanism of the brain, built of past experiences, cast as motor predictions, a pattern that repeats, sustains itself in the chaos. Our job is to pan for it like gold, sift it into our own nervous systems, reconcile the resulting contradiction, become something new.

wow

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