Oct

26

AI relevant:

Finding Peter Putnam
The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind

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.”

Stefan Jovanovich offers, with a bit of irony:

From Grok:

Peter Putnam (1927–1987) was an American physicist and theoretical neuroscientist whose work anticipated many modern concepts in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind. He studied under prominent figures like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and John Archibald Wheeler, and his ideas influenced early developments in computational theory of mind, though he remained largely unpublished and obscure during his lifetime. Putnam's writings, now digitized and discussed in recent scholarship (particularly following the 2025 rediscovery and publication of his papers), propose a functional model of the nervous system that integrates physics, game theory, and neuropsychology. His theory emphasizes how the brain achieves order and learning through mechanisms like Hebbian plasticity, distributed neural networks, and conflict resolution—ideas that predate similar concepts in predictive processing and reinforcement learning. Putnam's work is not a single, neatly packaged "theory of repetition" but rather a core principle woven throughout his model of cognition and behavior. Repetition serves as a foundational "goal function" for existence, learning, and induction (the process of generalizing from specific experiences).


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