Walter Pitts

Walter Pitts in 1954

Walter Pitts (23 April 1923 – 14 May 1969) was an American logician who worked in the field of computational neuroscience.

Quotes

Smalheiser, Neil R (2000). "Walter Pitts". Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43 (2): 217–226. ISSN 1529-8795. DOI:10.1353/pbm.2000.0009.

• Dress from the waist up.
• Ignore bureaucrats and they will ignore you.
• Next to Mozart, other kinds of music are not music at all.

Quoted in Gefter, Amanda (January 29, 2015). The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic. Nautilus.

• [Depression is] common to all people with an excessively logical education who work in applied mathematics: It is a kind of pessimism resulting from an inability to believe in what people call the Principle of Induction, or the principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Since one cannot prove, or even render probable a priori, that the sun should rise tomorrow, we cannot really believe it shall.

Quotes about him

• Walter Pitts, who was companion, protege, and friend to Warren, had, for a long time, been convinced that the only way of understanding nature was by logic and logic alone .... Pitts had committed himself to logic as the key to the structure of the world in a way that no other person that [ know had ever done.
  • Jerome Lettvin, (1991) Introduction to Volume 1 of The Collected Works of Warren S. McCulloch (Salinas, CA: Intersystems Publications). page 12.

Smalheiser, Neil R (2000). "Walter Pitts". Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43 (2): 217–226. ISSN 1529-8795. DOI:10.1353/pbm.2000.0009.

• The movie Forrest Gump made the point that the greatest, most heroic Americans are people of extraordinary character who flicker briefly into public consciousness and are quickly forgotten... while his contemporaries Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John von Neumann entered the pantheon of fame, Pitts remains a shadowy folk hero. Stories about Pitts have circulated among the cognescenti for years, but almost nothing has been written about him.
• “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain”... devastated Pitts because it showed that retinal ganglion cells were not simply acting as logical devices, thus appearing to shatter his dream that logic could be used to explain the nervous system.
• At about the time of the break with Wiener, and arguably because of it, Pitts destroyed his thesis and all of his papers, felt unable to become interested in anything new, and began a long, slow decline. He did not simply begin to drink—as befitting a man of his talents, he synthesized novel analogues of barbituates and opiates in the laboratory and experimented on himself by ingesting long-chain alcohols.
• The story is told that, at age 12, Pitts ran into the public library to hide from some bullies, found a copy of Principia Mathematica by the 20th-century philosophers Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, and proceeded to read it cover to cover in the next few weeks. Pitts experienced a metaphysical insight that logic rules the universe, and as a corollary he felt that ego—and his ego in particular— needed to be erased in order to achieve an understanding of the world.

Jerome Lettvin. Walter Pitts and the Inhibition of Affect, Affect and Artificial Intelligence (2011): pp. 109-132.

• Pitts was married to abstract thought... We never knew anything about his family or his feelings about us. He died mysterious, sad and remote, and not once did I find out, or even want to find out more about how he felt or what he hoped. To be interested in him as a person was to lose him as a friend. One was to be interested only in what he knew.
• He read incessantly and omnivorously, but stayed away from everyone. He read like someone waiting to die but willing to be distracted during the last hours.

Jerome Lettvin, quoted in Anderson, J.A. & Rosenfield, E. Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks, MIT Press (2000).

• [Pitts] was in no uncertain terms the genius of our group. He was absolutely incomparable in the scholarship of chemistry, physics, of everything you could talk about history, botany, etc. When you asked him a question, you would get back a whole textbook … To him, the world was connected in a very complex and wonderful fashion.
• It was apparent to him after we had done the frog’s eye that even if logic played a part, it didn’t play the important or central part that one would have expected. It disappointed him. He would never admit it, but it seemed to add to his despair at the loss of Wiener’s friendship.

Warren McCulloch, letter to Rudolf Carnap. Quoted in Gefter, Amanda (January 29, 2015). The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic. Nautilus., which cites the McCulloch Papers, BM139, Series I: Correspondence 1931–1968, Folder “Pitts, Walter.”

• He is the most omniverous of scientists and scholars. He has become an excellent dye chemist, a good mammalogist, he knows the sedges, mushrooms and the birds of New England. He knows neuroanatomy and neurophysiology from their original sources in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and German for he learns any language he needs as soon as he needs it. Things like electrical circuit theory and the practical soldering in of power, lighting, and radio circuits he does himself. In my long life, I have never seen a man so erudite or so really practical.

External links

• "Walter Pitts" autobiography Professor Charles Wallis, Department of Cognitive Science, California State University at Long Beach