Mastodawn

The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver.

There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper.

His name might have been Anonymous.
--But it wasn’t.

His name was Peter Putnam.

He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein,
John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr,

and two blocks from the crash, in his run-down apartment, where his partner, Claude, was startled by a screech,
were thousands of typed pages containing a groundbreaking new theory of the mind.

“Only two or three times in my life have I met thinkers with insights so far reaching,
a breadth of vision so great, and a mind so keen as Putnam’s,”
Wheeler said in 1991.

And Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,”
had worked alongside some of the greatest minds in science.
https://nautil.us/finding-peter-putnam-1218035/

Finding Peter Putnam

The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind

Nautilus

Chuck Darwin Jun 20

Wheeler, who made key contributions to nuclear physics, general relativity, and quantum gravity,
had thought more about the observer’s role in the universe than anyone

—if there was a clue to that mystery anywhere, I was convinced it was somewhere in his papers.

That’s when I turned over a mylar overhead, the kind people used to lay on projectors,
with the titles of two talks,
as if given back-to-back at the same unnamed event:

Wheeler: From Reality to Consciousness

Putnam: From Consciousness to Reality

Putnam, it seemed, had been one of Wheeler’s students, whose opinion Wheeler held in exceptionally high regard.

That was odd, because Wheeler’s students were known for becoming physics superstars,
earning fame, prestige, and Nobel Prizes:
Richard Feynman, Hugh Everett, and Kip Thorne.

Chuck Darwin Jun 21

Einstein himself was impressed with Putnam.

At 19 years old, Putnam went to Einstein’s house to talk with him about Arthur Stanley Eddington, the British astrophysicist.
(Eddington performed the key experiment that proved Einstein’s theory of gravity.)

Putnam was obsessed with an allegory by Eddington about a fisherman and wanted to ask Einstein about it.

Putnam also wanted Einstein to give a speech promoting world government to a political group he’d organized.

Einstein
—who was asked by plenty of people to do plenty of things
—thought highly enough of Putnam to agree.

https://nautil.us/finding-peter-putnam-1218035/

Finding Peter Putnam

The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind

Nautilus

So moving. Thank you.

Maybe it's just where I am,
Where I have found myself in my continual introspection and path seeking.
A Simple and beautiful life, where our patterns may destroy us.

s’il te plaît ne secoue pas,
je suis plein de larmes

@cdarwin that was an eye opener.

There are so few articles or mentions online, and reading excerpts of his writing, it’s passing a sniff test (e.g., doesn’t have a ‘I can’t science but I think this crackpottery is misunderstood genius’ vibe). Putnam models the brain as a concurrent-analysis cluster of tiny analytic engines, all trying to put themselves into a ‘yep, that’s how my tiny part of understanding my experience works’. We do ok at parts of that within AI, but we also often utilize procedural engines, functional engines, and the brain does neither. And then I haven’t found it yet in the bit of his writing I read, but she notes repeatedly his work toward the fisherman question, which asks if something about how our brains gather info is making our understanding of the universe intrinsically flawed. In the fisherman metaphor, it’d be ‘all fish are larger than 2”, because their net won’t catch anything smaller.

Thx for the share. For what it’s worth, he doesn’t seem even to have a Wikipedia entry at the moment. Or at least: I couldn’t find one. He’s *that* obscure ATM.

Kevin Davy Jun 21

@cdarwin
I would call, what he describes as repetition, as the struggle just to be. To me, it seems to be the drive of the universe. The eternal fight against entropy. To go from repetition to becoming more, seems to me the hallmark of awareness.

Fish Id Wardrobe Jun 21

@pathfinder @cdarwin Going to take me a while to process, but I'd call it 'identity'. "this is me, I do this. I don't do _that_, so let's move back to doing this."

Kevin Davy Jun 21

@fishidwardrobe @cdarwin
Yes, but also something a bit more fundamental to the nature of the universe. That existence is an active process of continuence.

Kris Dreemurr (they/them) of the Pnictogen Wing Jul 6

@cdarwin yeah but Feynman was shit and Kip Thorne is just...rock-star Caltech celebrity. I wouldn't trust him an inch. dunno who this Hugh Everett person is. spoken as an ex-Techie ~Chara

Kris Dreemurr (they/them) of the Pnictogen Wing Jul 6

@cdarwin honestly I'm not the tiniest bit surprised by an ex-physicist ending up dead in the gutter while a scumbag like Kip Thorne gets to advise Hollywood movies. the #Caltech culture is diseased beyond healing ~Chara

日本語まあまあ Jun 21

@cdarwin Lovely article. It does a really nice job of explaining his thinking (such as we can understand it) and contextualising and grounding everything. He might have decided his theories were rubbish but I can see a lot of the ideas being presented as being still pretty relevant. We probably need better glossaries/translations, though...

Fish Id Wardrobe Jun 21

@cdarwin astonishing article

the roamer Jun 21

Peter Putnam and his theory of the mind.

Wow. Fascinating article by Amanda Gefter, weaving together so many aspects of this man's thinking and his difficult life, cursed and blessed at the same time.

And Putnam's idea that learning and innovation emerge from a system whose components all have the goal of repetition and no-change is truly interesting.

#PeterPutnam #AmandaGefter #mind #learning

Dharma Dan Jun 21

@cdarwin what a fabulous article, and what an incredible individual. Thanks for sharing

Lana Sinapayen Jun 21

@cdarwin
"When a successful move, discovered by sheer accident, quiets a perturbation, it gets wired into the brain as a behavioral rule."
->
"We show that Learning by Stimulation Avoidance has a higher explanatory power than existing hypotheses about the response of biological neural networks to external simulation, and can be used as a learning rule"

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5291507/

Learning by stimulation avoidance: A principle to control spiking neural networks dynamics

Learning based on networks of real neurons, and learning based on biologically inspired models of neural networks, have yet to find general learning rules leading to widespread applications. In this paper, we argue for the existence of a principle ...

PubMed Central (PMC)

@cdarwin Thanks for sharing such a fascinating article. Peter Putnam’s many insights are surely due for wider examination. This article shows us also the malign influences variously from controlling parents, gay and racial discrimination, and finally, drunk drivers.

BlobhajSadReach

@cdarwin "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."