"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!
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.
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.”"
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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>
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.
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.
> 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.
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
We're not sitting around a campfire shining flashlights into our faces. We're reading an article supposedly about an unsung genius named Peter Putnam. Such an article should open with who he was and what he did that was so important yet unsung, and THEN delve into story details, not bury the important bit behind mountains of "It was a dark and stormy night" type filler.
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.
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.
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
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 ;)
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.
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
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)
Besides being unable to appreciate anything that isn't pure technical fact, why bother commenting on an article by saying you didn't read it past the first paragraph? In what way do you think your contribution is worthwhile?
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.
> 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.
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.
"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!
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 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.”"
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?
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.
After this article last week started to read his work (some available here https://www.peterputnam.org/) What a life, what a character.
> 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.
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.
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?
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>
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
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.
> 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.
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
Oh, feck off with your ableist nonsense.
We're not sitting around a campfire shining flashlights into our faces. We're reading an article supposedly about an unsung genius named Peter Putnam. Such an article should open with who he was and what he did that was so important yet unsung, and THEN delve into story details, not bury the important bit behind mountains of "It was a dark and stormy night" type filler.
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.
How was the comment ableist?
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.
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
You loathing others’ preferences /= them self-loathing. Presumptuous and insulting.
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
But the narrative has to be captivating.
Didn’t seem to captivate OP.
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.
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
Take out the flying duck “sh***rthy” and you will have made an excellent series of points.
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
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)
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..
Besides being unable to appreciate anything that isn't pure technical fact, why bother commenting on an article by saying you didn't read it past the first paragraph? In what way do you think your contribution is worthwhile?
Good point, it wasn't very helpful
Interestingly he doesn’t seems to have a wiki article, the only Peter Putman there is a bodybuilder
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.
What a beautiful article about a fascinating man -- I'd be glad to read a full biography.
Wow, I always thought Hilary was the only Putnam to come up with a computational theory of mind.
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.
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.
https://www.peterputnam.org
Sorry, this was no Vivian Maier.
Not even close.
> 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.
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.