(2025-06-17) Finding Peter Putnam

Amanda Gefter: Finding Peter Putnam. 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.

It was 1987 in Houma, Louisiana... 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.

Putnam really should be regarded as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Yet he’s completely unknown

“He also tripled the family fortune to about $40 million by investing successfully in risky stock ventures

The only paper Putnam ever published was co-authored with Robert W. Fuller, so I flew from my home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Berkeley, California, to meet him

Putnam had developed a theory of the brain that “ranged over the whole of philosophy, from ethics to methodology to mathematical foundations to metaphysics,” Fuller told me. He compared Putnam’s work to Alan Turing’s and Kurt Godel’s. “Turing, Gödel, and Putnam—they’re three peas in a pod,” Fuller said. “But one of them isn’t recognized.”

Fuller led me to Barry Spinello, a filmmaker in Bakersfield, California, who met Putnam at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1963. Cannonball Adderley was wailing on the sax. “I turned around and saw this guy doing a ridiculous dance,”

Spinello gave me an email address for Coleman Clarke, who had met Putnam in New York City in the 1960s while Clarke was doing his Ph.D. at Columbia University.

Even 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.)

When I asked why, if Putnam was so important, no one has ever heard of him, everyone gave me the same answer: because he didn’t publish his work, and even if he had, no one would have understood it.

In a January freeze in 2013, I headed to Rochester, New York, to meet Clarke

He told me he had some of Putnam’s papers in storage.

I thought we were going to his storage unit, that it would be filled with whatever storage units are filled with—old clothes and rusty bikes

That’s not what this was.

There were no old clothes. No mismatched chairs. Only filing cabinets. Rows of filing cabinets, all neatly labeled, giving the whole place the appearance of a professional archive. I looked around, stunned. It was the entire library of Putnam’s unpublished writings. His theory, his life. The whole long-lost thing

When Clarke first heard that Putnam had been killed, he made frantic phone calls to the Putnam family lawyer to find out what was happening with Peter’s papers. The answer seemed to be nothing

might have been thrown away. Clarke rushed to Ohio, loaded them onto a truck, and drove them to his home

Skimming through the papers I saw that the people I’d spoken to hadn’t been kidding about the Putnamese. “To bring the felt under mathematical categories involves building a type of mathematical framework within which latent colliding heuristics can be exhibited as of a common goal function,” I read, before dropping the paper with a sigh.

I’d already photographed some 10,000 pages of material when Clarke grinned and confessed, “There’s a second storage unit.”

Gradually, Putnam’s life and the scope of his theory came into view.
He developed it over the course of three decades, starting as a teenager in the 1940s. He wrote constantly

Putnam spent most of his time alone, Fuller had told me. “Because of this isolation, he developed a way of expressing himself in which he uses words, phrases, concepts, in weird ways, peculiar to himself. The thing would be totally incomprehensible to anyone.”

When physicists study the world, how can they tell which of their findings are features of the world and which are features of their net? How do we, as observers, disentangle the subjective aspects of our minds from the objective facts of the universe?
Putnam set out to do: come up with a description of the net, a model of “the structure of thought,” as he put it in a 1948 diary entry.

At the time, scientists were abuzz with a new way of thinking about thinking. Alan Turing had worked out an abstract model of computation, which quickly led not only to the invention of physical computers but also to the idea that perhaps the brain, too, was a kind of Turing machine.
Putnam disagreed. “Man is a species of computer of fundamentally different genus than those she builds,” he wrote

Putnam saw that it had its limitations. A Turing machine, by design, performs deductive logic—logic where the answers to a problem are contained in its premises

Induction, on the other hand, is the process by which we come up with the premises and rules in the first place. “Could there be some indirect way to model or orient the induction process, as we do deductions?” Putnam asked.

Putnam laid out the dynamics of what he called a universal “general purpose heuristic”—which we might call an “induction machine,” or more to the point, a mind—borrowing from the mathematics of game theory, which was thick in the air at Princeton.

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.

Putnam’s remarkable claim was that simply by playing this game, the system will learn; its sequences of moves will become increasingly less random

And here’s the weird thing: It’s a game that can never be won. The system never exactly repeats. But in trying to, it does something better. It adapts. It innovates. It performs induction.

When a successful move, discovered by sheer accident, quiets a perturbation, it gets wired into the brain as a behavioral rule

But the real magic happens when a contradiction arises, when two previously successful rules, called up in parallel, compete to move the body in mutually exclusive ways.

The brain can’t follow through with a wired-in plan—it has to create a new one.

How? By bringing in new variables that reshape the original loops into a new pathway, one that doesn’t negate either of the original rules, but clarifies which to use when.

The mathematics of game theory, Putnam said, guarantee that, since the original rules were in service of one and the same goal, an answer, logically speaking, can always be found.

New universals lead to new motor sequences, which allow new interactions with the world, which dredge up new contradictions, which force new resolutions, and so on up the ladder of ever-more intelligent behavior. “This constitutes a theory of the induction process,” Putnam wrote.

In notebooks, in secret, using language only he would understand, Putnam mapped out the dynamics of a system that could perceive, learn, think, and create ideas through induction—a computer that could program itself, then find contradictions among its programs and wrangle them into better programs, building itself out of its history of interactions with the world

Putnam had said you can’t understand another person until you know what fight they’re in, what contradiction they’re working through

Putnam grew up with money. He was born in 1927 in Ohio... home to the ultra-rich, in a big, white Victorian house with a round cone-topped turret and the expanse of Lake Erie unfurling from their backyard. Whenever Putnam made a new friend, his mother warned him, “They’re probably using you for your money.”

When Putnam and his older brother, Johnny, were little, their parents told them a story about a boy named Ikey.
So Ikey jumps. But his father doesn’t catch him. He steps to the side, lets the kid fall. “When Ikey cries and complains,” Putnam wrote, “he is told never to trust anyone, not even his mother and father.”
That was the moral of the story that Mildred and John Putnam told to their children. Never trust anyone. Not even us.

At 16, Putnam joined the Navy, and it was there, in radar school, that he realized his aptitude for physics. At the same time, he realized his desperation to unravel the mystery of minds. He needed to understand the secret motives his mother warned about, especially now that he was coming to grips with his homosexuality, which left him feeling helplessly set apart.

In 1944, Putnam received word that his brother, a fighter pilot in the Air Force, had been killed overseas. Peter’s diary entry that day read: “Tuesday—Johnny isn’t.” Johnny had been the Putnam’s golden boy: blond-haired, blue-eyed, confident, athletic. Now there was just Peter: bookish, skinny, painfully shy

Two years later, still reeling from Johnny’s death, he used his Navy credits to enroll as a physics major at Princeton.
John Archibald Wheeler took him under his wing, bringing him to Copenhagen to meet Niels Bohr, raving to Bohr about Putnam’s “very great interest in the philosophical aspects of physics.”

After graduation from Princeton, Putnam reluctantly enrolled in Yale Law School. Now that he was the only son, he was expected to become a lawyer like his father and grandfather. Two years later, his father was diagnosed with late-stage leukemia. As he was dying, he told Peter to forget law and use his inheritance to return to his real work. So Peter joined the philosophy department at Harvard University, planning to do a Ph.D. on Eddington. But when his father died in 1951, Mildred, wanting to retain control over the only family she had left, withheld the money. Peter’s decisions would go through her. Peter, determined to make his own money, dropped out of school and took a job at Sanders and Associates, an electronics company in New Hampshire.

From his salary alone, he saved up enough money to quit and return to Princeton to study with Wheeler for his Ph.D. He promptly informed Mildred that he would not accept another dime from her, ever. “I shall not need, and will not accept, any more money from you from here on,” he wrote in a letter.

Cut off from the family money, real friendships suddenly seemed possible

One of those friends was Fuller. They were walking across campus when Robert Fuller casually asked what Putnam was working on. Putnam turned to him and asked, “Do you really want to know?”
He’d never told anyone about his theory, but with money no longer blocking the way, it all came spilling out.

*He sold the Cadillac convertible Mildred had bought him, used the money to buy a bicycle, and gave the remainder of the proceeds to Princeton. He also gave them all the stock he’d earned at Sanders—some 600 shares, valued around $9,000, which he’d asked for in lieu of raises—on the condition that they wouldn’t sell them until he gave the green light. He did, a decade later, and they sold for more than $1 million.

Putnam asked that the donations be used to buy great works of modern sculpture to be displayed around campus. Clarke told me Putnam’s love of abstract sculpture came from “his thinking about the brain and the centrality of motor pathways”—the sculptural form resolving an artist’s own contradictions*

After a stint teaching physics in Amherst, Putnam followed Fuller to New York City in 1963. Fuller was teaching at Columbia, so Putnam taught a summer seminar in the physics department. His lectures were so heavily laced with philosophy that students from the Union Theological Seminary across the street began showing up.

After class they’d go to a nearby café, quoting lines of Putnamese. “Jazz is the mathematization of the soul.” “We know things in the act, not in their essence.” The Seminary hired Putnam, and set him up in the basement apartment on Claremont Ave.

In the day, Putnam taught and wrote; at night he’d walk uptown to Harlem to dance at the jazz clubs, a neural free-for-all to enact his improvisational mind. Most of the time, he was the only white guy there.

Back in Princeton, Wheeler was coming around to the idea that the observer might be implicated in quantum mechanics, and he knew his best bet for understanding the observer was Putnam. He was hoping that Putnam would return to Princeton so they could work together, uniting a theory of the observer with a theory of the observed. Putnam wanted nothing more. “So many people dream of convincing father images of the value of their work,” he replied.

When Mildred realized what was happening, she jumped in, trying to ensure that Peter would get the job and that he’d owe it all to her. She began dangling donations, offering to build a new physics building at Princeton with Wheeler’s name on it. Wheeler wanted no part of it, but Mildred was a force of nature, a hurricane in pearls.

*Putnam pleaded with her to stay out of his relationship with Wheeler, but she continued to allude to secret meetings and quid pro quo donations until he didn’t know who or what to believe.

Unable to trust that Wheeler’s interest was pure, Putnam refused to consider a position at Princeton, or a fellowship at the nearby Institute for Advanced Study. He stuck with teaching at the Seminary.*

It’s clear from Wheeler’s journals his interest in Putnam’s work was genuine and deep. Over and over, he read the few papers that Putnam gave him, writing out notes and questions line by line. “He would throw up his hands in despair,” Wheeler’s daughter, Alison Lahnston, told me, “but he kept at it.”

One morning in 1974, over breakfast in Manhattan, Wheeler took 12 pages of notes as Putnam talked about his work, then submitted a book proposal to W.H. Freeman & Company on Putnam’s behalf. The publishers bit, and were ready to draw up a contract, but Putnam again worried that his mother was behind the offer, and refused to sign.

Just then, a perfect opportunity arose to present Putnam to the public. Wheeler was invited by the Neurosciences Research Program at MIT to speak at their March 1975 meeting on “reality and consciousness.” He insisted he could only do it as half of a pair. From Reality to Consciousness. From Consciousness to Reality.

I listened to the meeting, recorded on a reel-to-reel, stowed away in the archives at MIT

The crowd grew restless. Wheeler’s talk had gone long, and there wasn’t time for Putnam to finish. The neuroscientists headed out for lunch and the tape cut out.

Things went from bad to worse. Back in New York, Putnam learned he’d lost his job at Union. The President cited “budgetary concerns,” which Putnam took as a veiled attempt to ask for a donation, suspecting that his mother had suggested as much to the administration behind his back.

But even Wheeler couldn’t penetrate Putnam’s defenses. Never trust anyone. It was a rule of behavior that had dug a trench in his neural circuitry, formed a universal, self-reinforcing loop, and no matter how many alternatives competed with it in parallel, it was always strengthened. It always won.

To weed out anyone who wasn’t in it for the right reasons, he refused to provide an easy summary. It was total commitment or nothing at all. So he built walls around his work, walls made of words, but he built them too high—they kept everyone out, and kept Putnam in.

*In June 1975, Putnam sat down and wrote a letter to Wheeler:

“It should be obvious that what I’m doing is a lot of nonsense. I didn’t convince any of the big boys at the conference*

Putnam placed his books on a table at Union Seminary for the taking, dumped stacks of manuscripts in the trash, gave his records and turntable to a janitor.

In 1975, Putnam had signed himself and Claude up for VISTA—Volunteers in Service to America, the domestic branch of the Peace Corps—and VISTA sent them to Houma. They were promised government housing, but when the building manager saw that Claude was Black, their apartment suddenly became unavailable. They tried another housing project. Same story. Finally, they went to Senator Circle, the Black project on the other side of town, but they weren’t welcome there either. Interracial and gay—there was no housing project for that. So Putnam found them a spot in a trailer park. The landlady said she’d pray for them.

The city had scraped together funds to open a new rec center and they’d asked Wayout to run it.

He just turned around and registered a new nonprofit, the Terrebonne Improvement Association (TIA). He put together an all-Black Board of Directors, then applied for VISTA volunteers of their own.

Claude delivered speeches to the TIA, co-written with Putnam behind the scenes. Putnam thought it was important that the community know all the legal tricks the white CEOs and politicians used to keep them down, so Claude spoke about reapportionment and gerrymandering; he urged them to vote in local elections, to make their voices heard on school boards and in town halls

Putnam continued to keep his wealth a secret. Mildred had released the inheritance from his father to him in 1972. Putnam put all the money into a charitable trust and named it the Mildred Andrews Fund so that it wouldn’t bear his name.

By the mid ’80s, Putnam, through stock investments, had grown the fund to $40 million

*Putnam never touched a penny for himself.

To make ends meet, he took odd jobs repairing radios and shucking oysters. He bought a place where Claude and he could live permanently—a small, one-bedroom apartment with a tiny kitchen and wood paneling on the walls. It was on the main road, next to a vacant lot, but the back door opened out onto the bayou, where they could sit and watch the shrimp boats go by and the moonlight ripple on slow, dark water. “Life is a simple thing,” Claude told Peter. “I want to live my life so people associated with me are happy.”*

Eventually Putnam landed a gig as a night watchman and janitor for the Department of Transportation. “It’s clearly the best job I’ve ever had,” he told Spinello on the recordings. “I needed to get other kinds of roots in the community

Putnam knew his mother had destroyed his relationship with Wheeler and had prevented him from getting his work out into the world, but he never blamed her.

Mildred got sick in 1981, and she moved in with her son and Claude. She could have lived anywhere, a mansion in New Orleans, with a staff, like she had back in Ohio, a chef, a housekeeper, nurses. Instead, Putnam gave her the bedroom, and he and Claude slept on the pullout couch

Putnam and Claude took care of Mildred for three years, until she died in 1984.

Wheeler continued trying to convince Putnam to publish his work.

December 7, 1987. Putnam swung his leg over his bicycle, like he’d done so many times before.
The drunken swerve.

On a fall afternoon in 2024, I wandered the Princeton campus among the towering sculptures

I watched as other people—students and professors—strolled right past them, as if the sculptures were invisible. Which was weird, because they’re huge.

In New York City’s West Village, in a sliver of greenery known as Christopher Park, across from the Stonewall Inn, where 1969 riots sparked the beginning of the gay rights movement in the United States, is a sculpture of four figures by George Segal

When Putnam commissioned the piece, he stipulated that the work “had to be loving and caring, and show the affection that is the hallmark of gay people … and it had to have equal representation of men and women.” When it was installed, the media called it the “first monument to homosexuals in the United States.”

The reason an induction machine—a mind—can do more than a universal Turing machine is because it’s always reaching out into the world.

Putnam turned his writings into a self-contained room where Ikey could hide and no one would find him. The only one who managed to crack open the door was Claude. “He teaches me how to live outside words,” Putnam wrote. Claude lived in their Houma apartment until he died in 2008.

His will stipulated that upon his death, his money—all $40 million of it—be given to the Nature Conservancy.

Today, science is beginning to catch up to Putnam. His ideas about the plasticity of the brain and the importance of neural conditioning have become mainstream. Many cognitive scientists are pursuing a theory known as “embodied mind” that emphasizes the central role of motor behavior in cognition and perception, so central to Putnam’s own theory.

At the same time, as Fuller put it, “there’s stuff in Putnam that no one has thought of yet